Living Knowledge

Digitizing dying languages, cultural artifacts, and elder stories — before this knowledge is lost forever.

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Inspiration

Inspired by the elders of rural and Indigenous communities around the world who carry extensive cultural knowledge, we wanted to build a platform that digitizes and preserves this heritage — giving these voices a lasting home and a wider audience.

What it does

Our platform preserves oral cultural heritage by extracting speech from video or audio recordings in the speaker's native language. The audio is then transcribed and translated, generating subtitles and a summary so the content becomes accessible to a global audience.

How we built it

We used the Django framework for full-stack development, Supabase (PostgreSQL) for our database, and the Chimege and ElevenLabs APIs for speech-to-text extraction.

Challenges we ran into

Our main challenge was integrating the database with the front end. Beyond that, development went smoothly with minimal roadblocks.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud to have developed a culturally meaningful piece of technology — one that bridges the gap between people in remote communities and urban audiences, helping preserve stories that might otherwise be lost.

What we learned

Time management was one of our biggest takeaways. Setting clear time intervals throughout the project helped us stay on track and use our time more effectively. Much better than our first at Syncs Hackathon last year.

What's next for Team MonGoats

We plan to continue developing the platform, with the aim of expanding language support and reaching more communities whose stories deserve to be preserved and shared.

Individual Contributions

Tengis Buyanbaatar: Integrating various APIs into the code artifact. Text extraction, size compression logic for inputting files. Search algorithm Bayrjavkhlan Tuvshinbaatar: Come up with ideas for the project. Develop the User-Interface of the website. Software testing with the website. Search algorithm Tuguldur Banidkhuu: Setting up the database connection,Deploying the website, voice-over for the video submission. Working on the back-end section. Search algorithm

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