Inspiration
When I started college, I noticed that many students, including me, struggled to understand what professors taught in class. I used to record lectures and listen to them again at home, hoping I would understand the concepts better. But even after listening to the same recordings, I sometimes couldn't understand everything completely.
I also noticed many other students doing the same thing. That's when I thought, instead of making students listen to long recordings again and again, why not turn those recordings into something that actually helps them learn? That's how LectureLift started.
What it does
LectureLift turns normal classroom audio and video recordings into useful study material.
Students can upload their lectures and get:
Easy-to-understand revision notes
Flashcards for quick revision
Quizzes to test their understanding
Mind maps to understand topics better
The idea is to help students learn from their actual classroom lectures instead of depending only on generic study material.
How we built it
We built LectureLift using React for the frontend and PocketBase for the backend and data storage.
For transcription, we use Groq/Whisper to convert lecture recordings into text. We then use Anthropic Claude to understand the transcript and generate notes, flashcards, quizzes and mind maps.
We also integrated PayPal Sandbox to test a one-time payment system for our Exam Booster feature. The payment is verified on the server before premium content is unlocked.
Challenges we ran into
One of our biggest challenges was getting accurate transcriptions, especially when dealing with long recordings and different speaking styles.
We also had to figure out how to connect multiple AI services, handle audio and video uploads, manage saved lectures and make sure the generated study material was linked to the correct lecture.
Integrating PayPal was another challenge. We had to handle order creation, payment approval, capture and server-side verification before allowing access to paid content.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud that we turned an idea based on a real problem into a working product.
LectureLift now supports lecture uploads, transcription, AI-generated study material, saved lectures and a working PayPal Sandbox payment flow.
We are also proud that LectureLift previously secured 3rd place and a $500 prize in the Hostinger 21-Day Startup Challenge.
What we learned
We learned a lot about building a product beyond just writing code. We worked with AI APIs, backend systems, deployment, file processing and payment integration.
We also learned that making something work technically is only one part of building a product. It is equally important to understand the actual problem students face and make the experience useful for them.
What's next for LectureLift
Our next goal is to improve the quality of generated explanations so students can understand difficult topics more easily.
We also want to move from PayPal Sandbox to live payments, introduce subscription plans, improve the overall user experience and test LectureLift with students from different colleges.
Eventually, we want LectureLift to become a place where students can upload their classroom lectures and learn everything they missed or couldn't understand in class.
Built With
- ai
- anthropic
- artificial
- claude
- edtech
- education
- full
- generative
- groq
- intelligence
- javascript
- language
- learning
- machine
- natural
- paypal
- pocketbase
- processing
- react
- speech-to-text
- stack
- whisper
