MQuill

Built in 24 hours at HackCambridge 4D, we have pushed ourselves to invent a capture lecture app that helps students to get the most out of their lectures. Using Azure’s Speech-to-Text service, MQuill provides transcriptions of lectures in real time. Thanks to custom acoustic and language models, MQuill achieves a high level of accuracy even when describing lectures in noisy environments commonly found in classrooms. The more often MQuill is used to transcribe lectures, the better the results get since MQuill gets used to various speaker styles. Our app enables searching for lectures that contain specific keywords or took place at a specific date. We use Azure’s Text Analytics service to identify keywords in the transcripts. With Named Entity Recognition we can identify dates in the user’s request, and search for notes that were recorded at the specified date. The keyword extraction provided by the Text Analytics service let MQuill identify the most important topics of the lecture. Search for lectures that contain specific keywords or took place at a specific date. We use Azure’s Text Analytics service to identify keywords in the transcripts.

We are a group of three students who met for the first time at Cambridge Hack 4D 2019: Areeg, a second year Engineering student at the University of Cambridge, Duc, second year undergraduate in Mathematics at the Technical University of Berlin, and Ioana, first year Computer Science student at the University of Edinburgh. Over the 24 hours of the hackathon, we learnt to take advantage of our diverse background to develop a fully functioning application. Areeg and Ioana were responsible for making MQuill smart enough to understand human language by developing and training the chatbot. Moreover without Areeg and Ioana the speech-to-text recognition would not be as fast and accurate as it is now. Duc was responsible for developing the iOS application, and he designed the user interface with all its colorful illustrations and smooth transitions. For all of us, Hack Cambridge 4D was an amazing experience that we will never forget - it was even Areeg's and Ioana's first hackathon! We became close friends, and promised to continue working on MQuill after the hackathon. As we received the invitation to Imagine Cup, we did not hesitate to step up for the next challenge after Hack Cambridge.