Speaks

Speaks is an application that helps individuals cultivate their public speaking skills with powerpoints and documents in hand. What inspired us to create the project is the sudden growth in remote jobs and teaching. Social anxiety is still prevalent even in the new dynamic. This is where Speaks comes in. Speaks enables a user to import presenting material (document, PowerPoint) through Google Drive to unlock an innovative practicing application. The react web-app allows users to practice pace, posture, and gestures, furthering one's confidence prior to an official presentation. To practice pace, Speaks enables users to set a countdown in which the user attempts to comfortably practice their presentation before an alarm goes off. Further, we practice posture and gestures through the use of pose-estimation, namely, facial recognition. Here, we analyze the user's movements to give suggestions on whether or not they sway and/or jitter too much for comfort. Diction is also fostered through the use of real-time speech-recognition in order to count filler words (e.x "Uhs", "Ums"). With all the aforementioned information gathered, Speaks gives suggestions after each presentation practice session based on the user's performance.

Half of our team consisted of beginner coders. These members of our team have never attended a hackathon in the past; codeday was their first hackathon. We guided them through the process of development and helped them learn the basics.

We faced multiple problems throughout this hackathon. Firstly, one of our team members was new to MacOS, and it was his first time using it extensively for a project. Out of what seemed like nowhere, his wifi disconnected. We troubleshooted and spent hours trying to resolve the problem, since he had to write some backend and middleware code and was unable to push/pull from github. After it felt like we tried everything, one of our team members brought up fiddler. Rather than using Postman, the member using the Mac decided to use fiddler for a change. Upon installing fiddler, proxy settings were changed within the wifi settings. We eventually figured it out and quickly got back to work