StudyLight

Paste your study material. Get a plain English breakdown with everyday analogies — with an audio version.

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Inspiration

University students are handed dense, text-heavy material in VLEs and online textbooks and expected to absorb it through re-reading alone. There's no second voice — no one to repackage the same content in a format that actually sticks

What it does

StudyLight gives any student an immediate alternative. Paste your study material, and the app:

  1. Generates a plain English rewrite broken into clear sections, each with an everyday analogy
  2. Produces an animated slideshow with voiceover that walks you through the explanation
  3. Presents everything in a clean, dark-themed UI — no login, no setup, just paste and learn ## How we built it
    • FastAPI backend streams progress to the frontend via Server-Sent Events — real progress, not a fake timer
  4. Groq API (llama-3.3-70b-versatile) generates structured JSON: summary, section headings, plain English rewrites, and analogies
  5. The browser's Web Speech API reads the voiceover — no extra service, works in any modern browser
  6. A tic-tac-toe game appears on the loading screen if processing is expected to take longer than 30 seconds
  7. Deployed live on Render ## What we learned This was my first experience with spec-driven development — planning the full scope, requirements, architecture, and build sequence before writing a single line of code. The biggest surprise was the speed: because every decision was already made, the build phase moved fast and problems were caught early at checkpoints rather than discovered late. I also learned why context quality matters so much in AI-assisted development — the richer and more specific the planning documents, the better the output at every stage. ## What's next for StudyLight File upload — accept PDF and DOCX as input, not just pasted text. Most students are working from downloaded lecture notes and textbooks, so drag-and-drop upload is the natural next step.

Save and export — let students download the plain English rewrite as a PDF, or save the slideshow to revisit later. Right now everything is session-based and disappears on close.

Richer slide animations — fade and slide-in transitions between slides rather than a simple cut. The content deserves a more polished presentation layer.

Multiple analogy styles — let the student choose an analogy type that matches their background (sport, cooking, music, travel). A musician and a footballer will connect with different reference points.

Skip controls on the slideshow — jump to a specific slide rather than listening through from the beginning. Useful when reviewing a section you didn't quite catch.

Smarter voiceover — the current Web Speech API voice quality varies by browser. A dedicated TTS model (like Kokoro) would give consistent, high-quality narration across all devices.

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