Yujafiy

Inspiration

Often, I find myself facing great difficulty staying focused and engaged watching Yuja, our recorded lectures provider. Some of my professors do not speak very clearly and I can only listen to the same person speak for so long. With the advent of AI voice generation technologies we wondered if it could be possible to replace monotonous voices with voices that we love and pay great attention to direct our lecture recordings.

What it does

The extension uses artificial intelligence to transcribe the video lecture and uses an AI voice model that are modeled after very famous and recognizable characters such as Mickey Mouse, Donald Trump, Morgan Freeman, any many more to come to make yuja lectures that more engaging.

How we built it

We started by making a Chrome extension using key technologies such as HTML, CSS and Javascript inside of the extension. On the backend side of things, we used flask and Python to create our backend server to communicate with our extension. We also utilized the free API provided by Topmediai.com to convert our transcripts into fun and exiting voices at are then returned to the backend and then returned back to the frontend and onto the user.

Challenges we ran into

One major problem we had was the fact we weren't able to scrape the transcript from the Yuja page and and send it off straight to our backend. Since Yuja is a private domain, it obfuscates the elements that we needed. In the end, we resorted to the user saving the transcript then uploading into our extension. Another challenge was figuring out how to use the AI model that we found as the instructions provided weren't very clear. Another challenge was figuring out the flask server and configuring it. Another major challenge was building the extension itself as none of us had ever built a chrome extension in our life.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud to get the front end and the back end communicating effectively as that was one major hurdle we had to figure our as we had never done it before. We also are very proud of figuring out how to use the voice API service as we also had never used one before and the instructions provided were not the best. We are very pleased with how the extension looks. But most importantly, we are very proud that we got it all working.

What we learned

Some things are a lot harder than they seem. We also learned that we can't expect everything to work the first time. But it is also very rewarding when we solve these hard problems. My partners also learned how to use Git, GitHub desktop, and learn some new Javascript.

What's next for Yujafy

We are planning to integrate translation features to translate the lectures in it's entirely so non native english speakers can also enjoy and understand the pre recorded video lectures. We are also planning to integrate a lecture summary feature and possibly a quiz feature based on topics found in the lecture.

Built With

• css
• flask
• html5
• javascript
• python
• topmediai