StudentNext

Did you ever want to take a photo and convert it to text that can be used anywhere? Take a video (or a class for us students) and get a quick transcript of it? You've come to the right place!

Comment

Inspiration

There were many situations where we wanted to take a picture of some notes that were on the class board to copy and use anywhere. Also, there were circumstances when we needed a transcript file of an online recorded lecture, possibly because we haven't followed the lecture or we couldn't clearly understand the professor's tone. In these cases, we did not have one single application that did both these actions and made our students' lives easier.

What it does

StudentNext is a simple application that fills this exact void. This application converts any text present in an image (format: jpg, jpeg, or png) and generates a transcript from a video (format: mp4 or wav). We can see the converted text on the website so that we can copy this text and use it on OneNote as our own private copy of notes.

How we built it

We used a multitude of AWS Services: Simple Storage Service (S3), Lambda, Transcribe, Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2). Also, we have used Web technologies: Angular and Node.js.

Challenges we ran into

Although, we had a wonderful opportunity to learn in detail about AWS Services, unfortunately, we were not able to implement one of our main functionality that was part of our initial plan. Our primary idea was to add a download functionality so that students can download the text file and save a local copy of it. We faced this challenge where we were not able to take this converted text file from Transcribe and route it into Angular to display it on the front-end, which led us to host it through Node.js. Also, we weren't able to use the file content using Node.js, so we had to directly pass the JSON text through Node and display it on the website.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We had not worked on any AWS Services before other than EC2. This hackathon organized by MakeUC was a great opportunity where we not only got to learn in detail about these AWS Services but also implemented them in a useful project. We also got a good understanding of other AWS services, which we plan to integrate into this project and also use in other personal and professional projects in the near future.

What we learned

As mentioned above, this Hackathon has been an immense learning experience, where we had to implement all these services together on a project. Also, integrating these services to Angular and Node.js was a challenging (but fun) task, which gave us good insight into how these technologies work behind the scenes.

What's next for StudentNext

We plan to add our main idea of providing a download functionality to the website so that students can save a local copy. We also plan on implementing a Chatbot service (using AWS Lex). This functionality lets us give any course name (Ex: Machine Learning), and it would then shows us the top 5 results where this course is being taught online (Ex: Udemy or Coursera). Lastly, we also have a plan on using other AWS services like Translate, which lets us download text to and from other languages, and also Simple Email Service (SES) sends a copy of the text file to the personal email of users who have subscribed.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates