Two McMaster students and one from Western University were among the winners of a Toronto hack-a-thon with an app that will transcribe a lecture podcast into notes.
ClassScribe is the invention of Alyssia Jovellanos and Jonathan Boulanger, first-year computer science students at Mac, and Martin Ciesielski-Listwan, a first-year software engineering student in London, Ont.
They won an HP sponsor’s prize — a GoPro camera — at the 24-hour AngelHack in Toronto earlier this month, competing against professional developers.
The hack-a-thon requires teams to come up with an idea and create a demo within 24 hours.
The winning group hopes to have ClassScribe ready to roll out in September. They are working on adding some functions and creating a business plan.
The trio say they came up with the idea for the app when thinking about problems they see around them.
While it might immediately be assumed that the problems to be solved with ClassScribe are 8:30 a.m. classes or boring lecturers, the students insist they were thinking about students with disabilities that make note-taking difficult or impossible.
The app, which builds on an open voice-to-text platform, includes algorithms that highlight often-repeated words and filter out fillers.
Features the group intends to include are zeroing in on words like “exam” and “test” and providing general summaries of a lecture’s contents.
Associate professor Christopher Anand says the translator will also be important to English-as-a-second-language students.
Anand, who teaches in the computing and software department and created McMaster’s software entrepreneurship program, said his son missed school for surgeries and that his university hired note-takers to attend class.
But it often took a week to get the notes.
“If this tool helps vulnerable students, maybe the university should be providing it.”
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