Smart Minutes

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Inspiration

Looking at the uses of Symbl.ai, our team wanted to heavily utilize its advanced conversation intelligence to make standard tasks of our era as easy as possible. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, our society has continually increased its usage of online means of communications, especially online meetings via video and voice calls. Without even knowing it, we spend hours sitting at our computers taking dozens of meetings per week, whether it be for school, work, or teams. With so much going on at once, meetings can easily become forgotten or disorganized. Taking advantage of the accessible audio stream from these calls and symbl.ai’s API, we realized we could simplify and automate the mundane task of taking meeting notes and upload them to a organized, central app where users can easily form and invite people to teams, create and share generated meeting notes, and gain a nice overview of all of their meetings.

What it does

Smart Minutes is an intelligent platform designed to provide users with an up to date repository of information regarding all of their previous meetings from all different aspects of their life; their work meetings, their personal meetings, any online communication recording can be uploaded to our application.

Once uploaded, the application passes the audio files through Symbl’s Async Voice and Conversation API, a program designed to allow for speech to text recording along with special features like phrase detection and key phrase identification. Smart Minutes utilizes Symbl’s API to create a record of the meeting, including but not limited to, date the meeting was uploaded, the transcript, key details, etc.

This is then saved, allowing users to come back and view what was discussed. In short, our application allows users to reference back to different types of meetings and provides them with a convenient way to store their meeting information and summarizes key details for them.

How we built it

We utilized Google’s Flutter framework to build the user interface of our application. Then, combining this with open-source packages, we improved the user experience by generating locally-stored login tokens for faster logins and implementing a teams functionality for organizations to easily share meeting notes and timings. Lastly, by utilizing the Symbl.ai API, we generated meeting minutes given an audio file, displaying a meeting’s important topics and action items.

Challenges we ran into

During the hackathon, our group challenged ourselves by using the Symbl.ai API that was given by the tournament directors. Having never used the API before, a major difficulty was to learn as much as we could about how to use them and what they can do.

In addition, to make a product that is truly accessible to all people, we decided to further push our boundaries by creating our application via Flutter, a Google UI framework capable of targeting and building to a variety of platforms. Two out of three of our group members have never used Flutter, so they had to learn the Dart language and dived into the world of app development, another first as a result of the hackathon.

In order to store our users’ information, our group tried to integrate our application with Firebase, however it was too large of an application to wrestle with in such a short time. As a result, we used MongoDB as an alternative, for it was relatively lightweight and easier to work with.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Taking in account the little experience our team members had with Dart and Flutter at the beginning of the hackathon, we are proud to be able to present a functioning application that successfully utilizes advanced APIs to revolutionize the way we record and organize meeting notes.

What we learned

Members of our team learned how to work with the Flutter framework and Dart, fetch and send data to APIs, and query databases. Having never worked with the Flutter framework or Dart before, it was a transformative experience learning a whole new language in less than two days. Dart is an extremely powerful language to learn, and thanks to this hackathon, we were pushed to advance our skills in a short amount of time.

What's next for Smart Minutes

As proud as we are of our project, there is always room to improve. Our next steps include implementing a new database service to increase the scope of our application, improving our user interfaces, and advancing the different types of services offered by our application.

In the future, users can expect to see improved teams integration and functionality and more thorough meeting notes that include action items, summaries, attendees, and main topics. The potential to grow in this project is exhilarating, and we hope to continue learning about Dart, Flutter, API’s and project development as we improve our application.