Professor Gen-Z

Problem

Lectures can be boring, filled with academic jargon. What's more, us in Gen-Z don't have the patience to sit there for upwards of two hours listening to endless yap. If only there was a way to bypass this burden, to maybe retrieve the same information without being subject to this torture. 🥱

Solution

Introducing Professor Gen-Z, a professor who doesn't like academic jargon. Professor Gen-Z is more than a lecture summarizer. He is a trained video-to-speech model with a twist: all his words come out in Gen-Z slang! We wanted to provide something new, something perhaps quirky, that still offered academic merit. While he won't replace the standard lecture format, we hope to introduce a fun alternative to a system that hasn't changed in several hundred years.

Our Approach

Here is our three-pronged recipe:

1. Employ Whisper AI to transcribe .mp3 and .mp4 lecture recordings
2. Devise two LLM prompts: first summarize the transcription, then "Slangify" the text
3. Use PlayHT's pre-trained human voices to convert the slang text back into audio.

We integrated this into a Node.js backend and React frontend.

Challenges we ran into

This hackathon was a first-time experience for all of us, and that didn't come without a few realities. 1.) We realized too late the importance of UX Design, 2.) we didn't know how important sleep would be, and 3.) not all of us were familiar with GitHub. We'll keep those in mind for the next hackathon though, and it should be a smooth sailing from there! 🏴‍☠️

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We got through it! At 2 AM, it all seemed impossible, but the project worked and it was quirky as we had hoped it to be. Some of us were able to write their first LLM application, and that's commendable!

What we learned

This was a very ambitious project, and we're very happy to have completed our first hackathon together. There were many ups and downs, many triumphs and failures, but most of all, we learned how to work as part of a team. How to put each other first. This project was only possible because of the hard work we each put as a team.

What's next for Professor Gen-Z

Built With

• node.js
• openai
• playht
• python
• react
• whisper