Science Buddy

Picture of part of our website!

Inspiration

We are three undergraduate Environmental Science majors who are constantly reading through abstracts to find papers we can use in our research. As STEM students, we find it difficult and tedious to read many scientific papers in one sitting. In order to solve this problem, we created Science Buddy, a user friendly program that takes in the link to a scientific article and spits out an MP3 file of the abstract.

What it does

All you have to do is enter in your favorite scientific journal and our website will return a MP3 file of the abstract that you can easily listen to on the go!

How we built it

As very beginner coders, we learned how to use beautiful soup to scrape scientific articles for their abstracts. Then, we used Google Cloud's Text-to-Speech API to translate the text into an MP3 file. Finally, we incorporated our Python program into an HTML website using Flask (and lots of Googling and mentor help :)). We also styled our website using CSS.

I registered the domain to be sciencebuddy.tech

Challenges we ran into

Flask is hard. We were relatively successful in creating the Python program back-end and the beautiful HTML/CSS front-end; however, connecting the two proved to be challenging. However, we did it and we are very happy!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We learned three languages. We tried something brand new. We made a very useful website for our field (and others, too!). Who needs podcasts when you have Science Buddy!

What we learned

Well, we learned what a back-end and front-end are in addition to the usefulness of Google Cloud APIs.

What's next for Science Buddy

Our next steps include printing the abstract on the actual website, rather than just in our terminal. We also would like to incorporate a list of difficult words that are automatically defined to improve accessibility within our field. Lastly, it would be neat to be able to scrape scientific journals for specific papers related to keywords that we input.

Built With

beautiful-soup
css
flask
google-cloud
google-cloud-text-to-speech
html
python

Submitted to

Pearl Hacks 2022
- Winner Genesys: "Best Use of Improving Customer Experience"
- Winner SAS: "Best Pairing of Curiosity and Innovation Hack"

Created by

I focused on creating the back-end program that used Beautiful Soup and Google Cloud's Text-to-Speech API to turn scientific paper abstracts into MP3 files. I also learned how to use Flask to connect our Python program to our HTML website.

Emma Rudy Srebnik
I helped code the python backend of our program by using skills to prompt the user to input a scientific link. I also coded the entire front end of the website and helped implement it into our python code. Lastly, I helped with the constant googling throughout the entire hackathon to find answers to our countless questions.

Jenna Hynes
I helped with generating the back-end of our website and trouble shoot the Flask framework to connect our Python code with our front-end product.

Prisca Lim