PhotoPaste

PhotoPaste: Real-Life Text to Your Laptop!

Inspiration

As students and researchers, we tend to encounter scenarios where it would be convenient to further analyze or document real-life text through our laptops. This, however, is often a tedious process as there is no simple way to get the text from the real world to the digital. Sometimes, we manually type out the words; sometimes, we take a picture and send it as a PDF. Fortunately, with PhotoPaste, this process goes from a tedious nightmare to a breeze.

What it does

Photopaste captures an image containing text, scans the portion highlighted by the user, and pastes it into the counterpart Chrome extension. This is then instantly available to paste anywhere on the laptop.

How we built it

We used Tailwind and React for the website, and HTML/CSS/JS for the extension. For the backend development and integration, we utilized Google Cloud (API and services) as well as Firebase. We also used Cloud Vision API to set up our project's AI/ML aspect.

Challenges we ran into

We had to get creative with the tools we used, as they were mostly in developer mode. This meant coming up with clever ways to make them work for everyone on the team. Take the OAuth0 API in our Chrome extension, for example. Since we were forced to run our extension locally, we didn't have all the usual bells and whistles that were available for a fully published extension. However, despite this, we were able to make do with what we had and, in the end, overcome these challenges.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are particularly proud of the text highlighting feature on our text scanning app. None of us had ever created such an advanced feature, so pushing ourselves to grow so much was great. Additionally, no one on the team had ever made a Chrome extension before. While this was somewhat of a simpler feat than the text highlighting, it is still something we are all proud of nonetheless.

What we learned

Each of us has undoubtedly gained valuable technical experience from this endeavor. For half of our team, this was the first web-based project in their entire lives. However, more so than the technical experience, each of us is more thankful for the teamwork we've demonstrated and the friendships we've developed. We've learned a deeper appreciation for working with others, one that we all are sure will continue to benefit us long after the conclusion of this hackathon.

What's next for PhotoPaste

The next step for PhotoPaste will be to develop it into a full-fledged mobile app. We believe that while a website is sufficient for the purposes of this hackathon, a mobile app would provide a more seamless user experience. Additionally, we would like to expand PhotoPastes' capabilities beyond just simple text copying and pasting. While the specifics will be left to the reader's imagination for now, know that PhotoPaste still has a bright future ahead of it.