A Study Hint for Final Exams

Originally published on the Clarify.io blog. View archived copy.

For most college students we’re just a few weeks from finals. If you’re in a college town, you can already feel their stress. The final projects are coming in, people are considering starting their term papers, and all those notes from months ago are suddenly relevant again. But there’s a problem:

Which notes are the most relevant and important?

They underlined, starred, and highlighted those things but after a couple months, those too are lost and forgotten. But things have changed radically in the last few years: recording is cheap and easy. In fact, your professors’ lectures may already be online.

So let’s say you find the audio (or video) of your professor’s lecture. For this we’ll use a TED video on memory fallibility:

Okay, so we have the video, now what? How do we find the relevant pieces without listening The solution is simpler than you might think. Odds are there are a limited number of phrases that a professor uses to signify important things:

• “This is important..”
• “This is a common mistake..”
• or the most important of all: “This will be on the exam.”

That is the key. We know that anything immediately before or after it will be key to the exam and we should spend some time to understand it. So now let’s get started using the Clarify SDK for Python:

Assuming we’ve already created a Clarify.io account, we can get our API key and upload the file:

Now our system goes to work. It will download the file, perform our language detection, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Natural Language Processing (NLP), keyword extraction, and a variety of other things. While we could just wait and check in occasionally, we could also use Clarify’s built-in webhook functionality to know the exact second the data is ready. As a rule of thumb, you should assume that every minute of video will take about one minute of processing on our end.

Once that’s ready, we can search for our magical phrase “on the exam” (including the quotes):

While our TED video above doesn’t have that particular phrase, we can search for “false memory” (quotes included) and we find every time it’s said:

Now we can skip around the talk to listen to the most relevant bits. In fact, if we were proficient with a tool like ffmpeg, we could even snip the media to pull out the most relevant bits to make class cliff notes.

If you have any questions or end up using this to study, drop us a note and let us know how it went.

And good luck!