Attending lectures is highly encouraged by professors, since it will give you a more direct type of education and will provide the chances to ask questions and have interactions. While I personally believe in the value of attending lectures, I do think that the knowledge gained during a lecture can be diverse and is dependent on a couple of things.
One of those things is the ability to focus on the professor speaking while trying to make notes. Personally, I try to make notes during a lecture which capture the important things which are presented in the lecture slides in combination with what the professors say about them. This can be difficult since not everything on the slides is relevant and not all contexts given by a professor are necessarily relevant. On top of that comes the speed with which you need to make notes of the slides and notes of what the professor said. Sometimes, these two can go very fast and therefore I went searching for an AI tool to help with this.
I wanted to find a tool which picks up the relevant information on every slide and notes it. This would decrease my time on typing the important stuff of the slides or copying certain images and increase my listening time. Although I went looking for such a tool, I have not yet been able to find one.
I tried multiple tools like slidespeak.co, pdf.ai, and Google’s new Bard. Here is a short summary so you do not need to try them (at this moment in time)
Slidespeak pitches that you can summarize PowerPoints or pdf and can ask questions to it but works very poorly. See the screenshot as an example. When asking about summaries or simple answers it does not provide answers.
I also tried pdf.ai but those similar problems. What I also noticed is that the tools had problems with converting image-to-text. As almost all lectures include slides with a combination of both, this is a problem for my idea.
Therefore, I tried Bard, which can convert image-to-text (Sha, 2023). Although it was not able to provide me with 100% reliable notes, it did a sufficiently better job than the other tools. I tried to find out what the boundary for complexity was in context of the combination with text and image and concluded that it was somewhere between the next two slides. It was able to correctly summarize the first one but did not capture the time effects on the second slide.
Unfortunately, I must conclude that a tool which will summarize lecture notes reliably is not yet out there.
References
Sha, A., (2023). You can now upload images to Google Bard; here are some cool examples. Beebom. https://beebom.com/google-bard-upload-images-cool-examples/
