parrot.

Inspiration

Everyone hates team meetings. More often than not, things get lost in the discussion due to miscommunication and lack of engagement. It’s also important that all team members are engaged and can engage in discussion worry-free of taking comprehensive and accurate notes. Our team wanted to improve the overall experience of team meetings and efficiency.

Additionally. COVID-19 has forced many organizations to bring their work online. The necessity of online meeting tools has been crucial for our world to stay connected. Both large organizations (corporations, companies, etc.) and smaller organizations (schools, classes, etc.) have needed to adapt the way they stay connected which has placed a big reliance on online meeting platforms. Although online meetings are not ideal in many situations, our team sought to improve the online meeting experience.

What if there was a way for teams to simplify their meetings by helping them document their meeting minutes? This tool would not only improve online meetings, it would be a useful tool for in-person meetings once they become viable again, post-COVID-19.

What it does

parrot is an app that automates your team's note taking. It records your meetings and converts them into readable, condensed meeting minutes to help improve the efficiency of your team meetings. Parrot summarizes the key points from your meeting and presents them in a formatted document. These notes can be downloaded and saved for future reference or for those who were unable to attend the meeting.

How I built it

parrot is built with Python flask, Google Speech-to-Text API, React-Bootstrap, HTML/CSS/JavaScript, and AppEngine for deployment.

Challenges I ran into

One of the challenges we ran into was to figure out how to send the audio file to the API because the web page records and saves it as a webm audio file which we then had to encode to base64 on the client side and decode it on the server side before we could send a get request to the API.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We are proud of the easy to use UX and bold yet simple UI that was designed, especially within such a short time frame. We were also able to successfully link the Google Speech-to-Text API to our front end.

What I learned

In terms of front-end, we learned how to use React-Bootstrap to craft our design and integrate React-mic. Many of the group members have not used React or have limited knowledge using React so it took a while for us to get used to the framework and how to integrate this on both the front end and back end side with Flask as well as connect both sides.

What's next for Parrot.

Next steps for parrot include adding formatting to the meeting minutes to improve aesthetics and include a note-summarizing function. We also want to make the speech to text conversion in real-time so that teams can see their progress. And to further improve its functionality and ease of use, an editing function can be added to allow teams to easily make changes to their meeting minutes.