Study Buddy

Inspiration

As university students, we wanted to create a way to easily make flash cards to help us study for exams. Having to manually write out flash cards is both a time sink and very tiring so we decided to make a way to create flash cards without leaving the comfort of our beds.

We also conducted a survey among our friends that found that 60% of respondents said they learned best by saying things out loud, which gave us more motivation that such a product might be useful.

What it does

Voice activated assistant to help people memorize terms.

Try it out here

How we built it

Voiceflow + Google Cloud Platform (App Engine, Firestore) + Node.js + Express

Challenges we ran into

Couldn't get Voiceflow to connect directly to GCP so we had to make an Express API to query Firestore for us and then query the Express app from Voiceflow. This also meant that we had to deploy our app to Google App Engine for hosting. Some compromises on UX were made due to the time limit.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Built something that works thank god
• Managed to complete a custom backend API in less than 2 hours
• Built a surprisingly complex user flow within Voiceflow

What we learned

• Learned how to use GCP and Voiceflow's tools

What's next for Study Buddy

• Integration with spreadsheets, Quizlet or website so learners have visual aids as well
• User analytics- Showing user's progress, adjusting the difficulty of questions...the possibilities are endless!
• voice memos, mnemonics and the option to add notes (visual and verbal) -Making study buddy as friendly as possible
• Options to change the pace of the test. We would love to have a lightning round option = Gamifying it as much as possible. Learning should be fun after all!
• Make it easy to add to user's routines

Built With

• app-engine
• express.js
• firestore
• google
• google-cloud
• node.js
• voiceflow