Video Summarizer

Inspiration

In a world affected by COVID-19, online conferences and recorded lectures rose in usage exponentially. With that, so did student boredom. We wanted to make a tool that allowed summarizing of a video with just one click as a web tool.

What it does

Our web tool takes a YuJa link, Youtube Link or Zoom Link with an available transcript and sends it the SMMRY API to process into a summary to send back to the user.

How we built it

We built it with HTML/CSS and Javascript for the frontend and Python with Flask and requests for the backend, as well as Selenium to web scrape the YuJa and the Zoom transcript. We linked them both with Javascript's built in Fetch API.

Challenges we ran into

One big challenge for all of us was Git and Github issues, especially since we are all beginners, only one of us having attended one prior, and the rest of us were new. We also had trouble working with API and processing their text. One huge issue that we spend a long time on was that the API server cached our page, and we were able to get around that by having random query. One challenging aspect was working with the different formats to get the transcript out and getting around different elements that held the data we needed.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to use a remote server and tested that we were able to help multiple users at the same time. We were also proud of how we could delegate specific sections so that we worked efficiently. Another accomplishment was the seamless linking of the frontend and backend.

What we learned

One thing we learned was how to build an effective backend with multiple API's working together. Another thing was being able to web scrape different sites based on user input. We were also able to get around limitations of the API's, such as no punctuation in YouTube transcripts and having to wait in the web scrape to change frames.