VocalBrief

Inspiration

Our inspiration was that we are college students and have a lot on our schedules. Sometimes we tend to be forgetful and forget things, and that's why we feel that a morning debrief is so crucial in our everyday lives. It will help us achieve several things at once: wake up on time, be aware of our tasks for the day, and plan how we want to approach our schedule.

What it does

This project is an alarm software that connects with Google Calendar to provide a personalized start to the day, including advice on how to handle tasks ahead and prioritize a healthy work-life balance, taking into account your schedule for both the current and upcoming week.

How we built it

First, we split the task into parts, which included fetching events from Google Calendar, obtaining recommendations from Gemini, having ElevenLabs speak out the tasks for the day and other information, displaying the clock, designing the clock, and connecting everything.

Challenges we ran into

Trying to implement our code on hardware was the most significant challenge we encountered. As we are all relatively new to hardware, we had to learn a lot throughout the process (E.g., how to solder, how to set up a Beagleboard, and how to output sound from hardware, etc.). After trying various methods, we were unable to connect our hardware device to the internet, which is necessary due to the nature of our task. Ultimately, we decided on a software-only demo to convey our idea.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the fact that we learned a great deal about hardware during our time at HackUMass. Coming into this hackathon, we had no plans to incorporate any form of hardware into our project, but we ended up taking that risk and learned a great deal about what goes into connecting hardware and software.

What we learned

We learned a ton about hardware. We learned about different types of hardware and how they are used, how to integrate hardware and software, how to solder, and how to connect circuits.

What's next for VocalBrief

In the future, plan to develop an actual hardware alarm clock that will run the software we are presenting at HackUMass. Another thing we considered is adding additional information to the customized briefing, such as a weather forecast/recommended clothes, or even a recap of recent news. We were also thinking about including a mental health check-in and advice based on the schedule. For example, if the software detects that you have had a hectic week, it would suggest taking a moment to rest and reflect.