Rewind

Breaking down barriers to listening, one word at a time. Transcribe your lectures in real-time and save recordings for later, with a suite of accessibility and ease-of-use tools to assist you.

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Inspiration

Listening is hard.

Lectures are, by nature, a one-size-fits-all solution to learning. The rigid structure and pacing of a long, uninterrupted talk isn't suitable for every learner. People can struggle to understand words, have disabilities that creates additional challenge to listening, or simply need more time to understand an idea.

What it does

Rewind is a mobile/desktop application that transcribes lectures in real-time, and offers specialized tools to make learning more accessible to everyone.

  • A Live Closed Captioning System, for those who prefer reading to listening.
  • Rewind a lecture to review a transcript and image of a moment missed.
  • High-contrast, easy-to-read UI for stark readability.
  • Support for OpenDyslexia, a font built for accessibility.

Our hope is that Rewind can break down the barriers to education for everyone. By addressing the shortcomings of a traditional lecture, we create learning environments for a wider range of backgrounds and abilities.

How we built it

Rewind currently consists of a Product Demo and a Technical Demo. The Product Demo is built on Figma, while the Technical Demo is built on Java using Google Cloud APIs.

Challenges we ran into

Challenges included:

  • Authenticating Google Cloud APIs (1 hour)
  • Creating Java Swing UIs (2 hours)
  • Rigging together Figma prototype (4 hours)
  • 3/4 of our team members were severely sleep deprived (West Coast Time Zone is Pain)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Completed both a Product Demo and a Technical Demo
  • Finished while two members of our team were moving houses
  • Was Troy's first hackathon, ever (and he did very well)

What we learned

  • IntelliJ's Swing Designer is a fickle one
  • Google's Cloud API authentication is a very long and involved process

What's next for Rewind

In addition to combining out Product and Technical demos, we have thought of a few potential additional features:

  • Video/Audio capturing and rewinding
  • Support for translating portions of transcripts into other languages
  • Support for image descriptions and alt-text for those with vision issues

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