TomoTube AI Reading Companion Capstone Project

Goals

The team goal of this project is to create a tool for students ages 18-22 who struggle with sustaining attention and/or reading comprehension to help them complete assigned academic texts so that they can succeed in their coursework. Our goal overall is to utiize AI to make an everyday process in our lives more efficient.


Individually, my goal is to successfully manage a team, ensuring effective communication and collaboration. As the project manager, I want to ensure we meet our goal, complete deliverabes, and create a functioning product.


Process

We began with conducting user research through a survey and interviews. We also conducted literature reveiews and existing market solutions for our identified problem. Insights gathered from this research informed our user persons, which we referenced when building out our features.

Tools

  • React (JavaScript, HTML, CSS)
  • Cloud database
  • Generative AI API (Ollama)
  • Text-to-speech program (LemonFox)

    • The main features of our minimum viable product are text complexity translation, text-to-speech reading, and base UI for intuitive user navigate.


    Takeaways

    Our main takeaway as a team was to constantly iterate the scope of the product and adapt features to what the users actually want need. We had many ideas in the beginning about what we wanted our project to look like, such as having a "brainrot" slang version of the reading, but user testing found this to be ineffective. We also had to adjust the scope of the project multiple times to adapt to time constraints and our skill sets.


    My biggest individual takeaway as a team leader was to more strictly hold my team members accountable. There were many instances of a breechs of our team agreement, and these continued because I was too lax. I recognize now I should handle these instances more promptly and to stick to our agreed upon norms. We need to hold ourselves and each other accountable.


    Next Steps

    For this next quarter we will integrate cohesive branding and customizaiton settings. This includes changing text, audio, speeds, and other features found through user testing. We will focuse on getting lots of user feedback and testing with diverse audiences.


    Going forward, I will hold myself and my team accountable to our revised team contract. I will continue to document our project plan and progress, keeping the team aligned with goals and scope. I will maintain communication across members and delegate tasks effectively to invidividual skills and team needs.