Free AI App for Learning Support (Note Taking)

When one of our learning support teachers asked me if there were any AI tools that would take notes for students, I could think of several solutions…but decided to create one myself and use this as an opportunity to test whether open-source resources (which help solve issues of privacy and cost) would be performant enough to be fit for purpose.

---

To be clear, Dash Notes (named after our dolphin mascot at International School of Panama) is a proof of concept. It will transcribe and summarize voice recordings (for instance of class) - but it will make you wait for it, and it might very well make mistakes.

 The transcription is operated through OpenAI Whisper, an automatic speech recognition system designed to convert spoken language into written text. Made available as an open-source project, Whisper is free to use.

Running Dash Notes locally also means that your audio (voice recording) will be processed on your computer only, and not shared with anyone.

The summarization is performed with the facebook/bart-large-cnn model, a bidirectional and auto-regressive transformer specifically designed for this task (the model was fine-tuned on a dataset of CNN news articles and their corresponding highlights).

 This app should thus be used with caution. It is the first to come out of our nascent AI Lab here at ISP. The output could be improved (and made faster) by using proprietary models and various paid subscriptions, but Dash Notes is free for anyone to use (MIT license)

To try it yourself, you can clone the GitHub repository and run it locally on your computer:
https://github.com/jeremierostan/DashNotes

Alternatively, you can use the demo space on HuggingFace, but this will share the audio with their servers, so please review their terms of use and privacy policy:
https://huggingface.co/spaces/jeremierostan/DashNotes
​
Let me know what you think - and how to improve this early version!