## Inspiration

From a 7-minute presentation to a 3-minute time slot, the presentation was cut more than half from last year! This immediately threw out ideas and we had to start idea generation from scratch. This resulted in the AI-generated 2 in 1 slideshow and pitch deck creator! Easily fits your presentation within the 3-minute time slot.

In the modern world, this problem happens quite often. In fact, we, the students, have been struggling with tight deadlines, crazy ideas, and the will to pitch them out for a long time already. The truth is that many of us do not have the time, skills, or knowledge to make ideas happen and gain a following behind them. So, whether you are an aspiring entrepreneur, or perhaps a professional in the competitive business world, we know there is one thing you need the most: A quick and easy problem-solver.

We can look at a high school teacher, who may want to present something very quickly to a class of young pupils. Or, we can peek at a professional consultant, who has to meet with clients rapidly. Lastly, we can also check out a teenager looking at their first idea coming to life. The common denominator between all of these cases is reasonably straightforward: Pitches of all sorts are everywhere, used by all sorts of people with unique backgrounds. So, we picked up our notebooks and markers, then got to work.

## What it does

Pitch Perfect lets you enter a prompt, a logo idea, and the length of your pitch. The program then takes these inputs and generates slide decks using Artificial Intelligence. Every slide can be edited to fix mistakes or add information to help with context.

The program goes beyond just generating graphics and texts, as it also generates a script that fits perfectly into your presentation length. It completes your idea and flushes out as many details as possible without compromising your starting point.

Piqued your interest? Check out our code and instructions to run through our GitHub link below, or click on our fully-deployed link to a Heroku website that hosts our application. Our Figma file is also up for views if you would like to check it out!

## How we built it

We used OpenAI to generate outputs based on prompts given by user inputs. The data were then processed to be outputted to put on pitch deck templates. The code was made to be modular for future expansions, and UI/UX design was considered throughout the entire process.

Extensive economic research has been conducted to understand the target market and dive deeper into the product's purpose. The full details can be found below under Economic Report.

The front end involved HTML/CSS and JavaScript code in implementing the UI, as well as functions to support the core features of our completed MVP. The backend used Flask and Python to power advanced API calls from and to OpenAI, and was used to process data effectively for frontend deployment and rendering. Besides the slide deck templates and UI/UX design/implementation, nothing else was created using Artificial Intelligence.

## Challenges we ran into

There were many challenges in terms of frontend, backend, and design. The frontend integration with backend took a very long time, and there were many iterative design cycles to complete the frontend design. The backend involved many optimization and data processing issues, where we found it difficult to get the most ideal results for our test cases. For design, we expanded our scopes many times to include new ideas into our design files, so that they can be implemented in the future. However, this definitely drove up the creation time, and pushed our team to the limit to deliver a fully-completed initial product as our MVP.

In the end, we are proud to say that challenges were tackled and a functional product has been delivered. We hope you enjoy our work and have some fun with it! It never stops fascinating us to work with advanced technologies such as Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

* For Michael, one of our members who is in first-year, this was his first ever Hackathon!
* We successfully implemented all features of our MVP, not a single loose end!
* We hosted it on Heroku. Although online hosting made it difficult to pass keys, we hope it can work for at least some of you so you can skip all the hassle to run our program
* We did a lot of research! A 6-page report has been done to analyze our product from the economics aspect. We came in wanting to solve a problem, and we definitely found ourselves a big one
* Our UI/UX took many hours and we are proud of it! The design itself satisfies many concerns that we hope to address, and experimenting with templates has allowed us to plan our the future steps for our application
* All of this was done over the last 36 hours! This was by far the most complete project that served a great purpose, and we hope to expand on it further in the future to cause a bigger impact

## What we learned

We learned to work in a very diverse team. None of our members did anything similar, and we learned many lessons from it. From UI/UX design to data processing, we rapidly grew to reach an ideal MVP. The challenges from integration made us comfortable with the Flask framework, and we cannot wait to apply it more in the future!

Designing the product was a big challenge. Our designer used Figma for the first time and made a name for himself! We also spent more than a quarter of the event brainstorming, so idea generation and product design have been firmly embedded into our heads.

For our programmers, it was challenging to integrate the backend modularly into a frontend environment, and we were glad to face many difficulties with almost all of our choices of programming languages. In the end, it was satisfying to see things come to fruition.

Our newest member, Michael, learned many product design, development, and management concepts. The discussions were very useful in understanding high-level and sometimes industry-standard problem-solving processes.

Heroku came as a bit of a surprise, and we hope to learn more about it to host our products online to reduce friction when accessing our app.

## What's next for Pitch Perfect

Our immediate next step involves creating more templates to satisfy more target audiences and designing a sound and fair monetization system. After that, we hope to optimize our design with a landing page and other support pages for our brand, and redesign some of the code to be more efficient.

We also hope to incorporate a database into our program, such as Firebase and MongoDB, to storage data for our users and allow membership on the website. Many features would be impossible without a data storage system, so we aim to get that done as soon as possible.

Lastly, we would love to sit down and do more research. This includes both user research and market research. To make a successful product, we are very interested to understand more of the industry and our target audiences, and hopefully discover new insights and rooms to improve.

This was a fantastic project, and we hope you like it as much as we do!

## Economic Report

QHacks 2023 Pitch Perfect Market Sizing (TAM, SAM, SOM) Analysis and Monetization

1. Monetization:
2. Paid content: Offering premium content or additional features to users who purchase a subscription can generate revenue, but it can also alienate casual users who are unwilling to pay.
3. Affiliate marketing: Partnering with other businesses and receiving a commission for sales generated from the website can be a great way to monetize the website without alienating users, but it requires a lot of effort to properly manage affiliates.
4. Licensing model: This strategy would involve selling licenses for the product to businesses or organizations that want to use it for their own presentations. The downside to this is that it may not generate as much revenue as other monetization strategies, and it may also limit the number of users that are willing to pay for the product.
5. Total Addressable Market (TAM):
2.1 Tourism Industry [1]:
6. User penetration is 24.3% in 2023 and is expected to hit 27.2% by 2027.
7. The average revenue per user (ARPU) is expected to amount to US$0.46k.
8. Revenue is expected to show an annual growth rate (CAGR 2023-2027) of 4.41%, resulting in a projected market volume of US$1,016.00bn by 2027.
9. In the Travel & Tourism market, 74% of total revenue will be generated through online sales by 2027.
10. Economical impacts to the tourism industry include another global pandemic, war, recession.
11. Since the tourism industry is a sales market, presentation is a key factor and there are many many middle men and smaller agents doing the selling. The trend is currently gearing towards online sales. US market is the largest.

2.2 Pharmaceutical Industry [2]:

1. Revenue is expected to show an annual growth rate (CAGR 2023-2027) of 5.39%, resulting in a market volume of US$1,435.00bn by 2027.
2. Impacts to this industry could be another global pandemic. Impacts are always happening as breakthrough medications and treatments are occurring. Disruptions in the market could include companies such as “Cost plus drugs” from Mark Cuban which aims to undercut the pharma industry. The pharma industry is and will continuously grow.

2.3 Medium to small companies:

1. The 27 million small businesses generate approximately 50% of the GDP in the United States [3].
2. The most common reasons small businesses fail include a lack of capital or funding, retaining an inadequate management team, a faulty infrastructure or business model, and unsuccessful marketing initiatives [4].
3. Marketing has a direct correlation with market demand in the sense that it targets a specific audience in which you as the marketer are looking for. The marketing creates demand and instigates interest in your product [5].

2.4 Education Industry:

1. In the United States, approximately 16.8 million students attend high school on average a year [6].
2. Approximately 19 million postsecondary students in the United States every year. 13.87 in public, 5.12 in private institutions [7].
3. Average global percent of GDP spent on education is 4.3%. Of this, 92.2% is spent in public institutions and the other 7.8 percent are divided between different forms of private education [8].

2.5 Media Industry:

1. In 2021, in the year of recovery from the effects of the global pandemic, the value of the media and entertainment market reached 2.34 trillion U.S. dollars, experiencing a growth of 10.4 percent compared to 2020. In the following years the growth is set to slow down, but dollar figures are expected to reach 2.93 trillion by the end of 2026 [9].
2. Media industry is threatened constantly with lawsuits with false information. The media is also in constant controversy which leads to ups and downs in attention. There are certain riskier outlets than others, and the mainstream media sources are sources that aren’t necessary trustworthy, but are here to stay for the long term.

2.6 Startups:

1. Data from the US Census Bureau shows that an average of 4.4 million businesses are started every year. That average is from the past five years of business formation data in the United States [10].
2. Startup owners can spend around 40% of their working hours on tasks that do not generate income such as hiring, HR tasks, and payroll [11].
3. The global startup economy remains large, creating nearly $3 trillion in value, a figure on par with the GDP of a G7 economy [12].
4. Artificial Intelligence (AI): industry is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 42.2% from 2020 to 2027 [17].
5. Healthcare Tech: valued at $74.2 billion in 2020 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.7% over the forecast period (2028) [17].
6. Educational Technology (Edtech): The edtech industry was valued at $89.49 billion in 2020, with an expected compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19.9% until 2028 [17]
7. Financial Technology (Fintech):To be exact, the fintech market was valued at $127.66 billion in 2018, and experts predict by 2022, the industry will be worth $309.98 billion. Fintech makes up 7.1% of the tech industry [17].
8. Serviceable Available Market (SAM):
9. 1 Education:
10. There are close to 85 million teachers worldwide: 9.4 million in pre-primary; 30.3 million in primary; 18.1 in lower secondary; 14.0 in upper secondary; and 12.5 in tertiary education. By 2030, an additional 68.8 million teachers will need to be recruited just for primary and secondary: 20 million are required to expand access to primary and secondary school and 49 million are needed to replace those who leave the workforce [13]. In fall 2020, of the 1.5 million faculty at degree-granting postsecondary institutions, 56 percent were full time and 44 percent were part time. Faculty include professors, associate professors, assistant professors, instructors, lecturers, assisting professors, adjunct professors, and interim professors [14]. As of 2019, there are 601 million secondary school students. This number continuously climbs every year up from 450 million in the year 2000 [15]. 235 million students are in post secondary institutions globally as of 2022. This number is up from 100 million in 2000 [16].
11. Geographic limitations occur when technology is not up to par. The reach of the internet and the electronics capable of taking full advantage of the slideshow need to be present or else the product cannot reach that audience.
12. Currently there is only 1 competitor associated with the product we are creating and to the scale being created. This product is pay to use only, and the product isn’t widespread and isn’t being pushed widespread.
13. Distribution can occur through presentations to districts and teacher conferences. Proof of scalability and alternative solutions must be provided to ensure success in the distribution phase. Distribution to students can be done organically through social media, this is a very similar way to how ChatGPT grew as the product has its own wow factor which is very promotable [18].
3.2 Startups:
14. The market's largest segment is Crowdlending (Business) with a projected total transaction value of C$40.70bn in 2023. Total transaction value in the Digital Capital Raising segment is projected to reach $84.13bn in 2023 [19]. The target audience are these startups that present and constantly pitch their ideas to investors for crowdfunding or venture capital.
15. There are no geographical limitations to our product as long as the startup has access to the internet and is able to present the created slideshow accordingly.
16. The distribution can be through ads or social media trends similar to ChatGPT.
17. Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM)
4.1 University and Postsecondary Students
Targeting students and educators requires a well-planned strategy that centers on providing a valuable solution to their specific needs. Our AI-powered script and presentation creator addresses the common challenge of creating effective presentations and scripts, a problem that many students face. Additionally, it addresses the issue of educators spending a significant amount of time creating their own presentations, thereby allowing them to focus on research and other important areas. By providing a user-friendly interface and a free version of our product, we can effectively demonstrate its capabilities and value proposition to this demographic. While there is some competition in the market, our key differentiator is the ease of use, accessibility, and the ample features offered in the free version, which will drive adoption through user satisfaction. To increase brand awareness and drive initial adoption, targeted marketing efforts and paid usage may be necessary. However, the ultimate success of our product will be determined by its ability to effectively meet the needs of students and educators.
4.2 Startups
Startups often have limited budgets; therefore, our product will be offered at a free version but also an affordable price with premium features to cater to this market segment. Additionally, we will leverage online distribution channels such as social media and startup networks to reach our target market. Startups are often in need of efficient and cost-effective solutions for creating presentations and scripts. By focusing on this specific market segment, we have the potential to capture a significant share of the startup market. By targeting startups, we can tap into a niche market with a high potential for growth. We will leverage social media and startup networks to increase brand awareness and establish ourselves as a go-to solution for startups. There are a few AI script and presentation creator tools on the market, however, similar to our 1 competitor, they have not prioritized marketing and promoting themselves. By focusing on this niche market in startups that are constantly pitching themselves to venture capital and crowdfunding sources, we can differentiate ourselves from the competition.
18. References
[1] “Travel & tourism - worldwide: Statista market forecast,” Statista. [Online]. Available: <https://www.statista.com/outlook/mmo/travel-tourism/worldwide>. [Accessed: 28-Jan-2023].
[2] “Pharmaceuticals - worldwide: Statista market forecast,” Statista. [Online]. Available: <https://www.statista.com/outlook/hmo/pharmaceuticals/worldwide#revenue>. [Accessed: 28-Jan-2023].
[3] [Author removed at request of original publisher], “5.2 the importance of small business to the U.S. economy,” Exploring Business, 08-Apr-2016. [Online]. Available: [https://open.lib.umn.edu/exploringbusiness/chapter/5-2-the-importance-of-small-business-to-the-u-s-economy/#:~:text=The%20nearly%20twenty%2Dseven%20million,50%20percent%20of%20our%20GDP](https://open.lib.umn.edu/exploringbusiness/chapter/5-2-the-importance-of-small-business-to-the-u-s-economy/#:%7E:text=The%20nearly%20twenty%2Dseven%20million,50%20percent%20of%20our%20GDP). [Accessed: 28-Jan-2023].
[4] M. Horton, “The 4 most common reasons a small business fails,” Investopedia, 19-Jan-2023. [Online]. Available: [https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/120815/4-most-common-reasons-small-business-fails.asp#:~:text=The%20most%20common%20reasons%20small,model%2C%20and%20unsuccessful%20marketing%20initiatives](https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/120815/4-most-common-reasons-small-business-fails.asp#:%7E:text=The%20most%20common%20reasons%20small,model%2C%20and%20unsuccessful%20marketing%20initiatives). [Accessed: 28-Jan-2023].
[5] B. B. FZE, “Relationship between marketing and Consumer Demand,” UKEssays, 16-Jan-2023. [Online]. Available: [https://www.ukessays.com/essays/marketing/marketing-customer-value-and-their-relationships.php#:~:text=Marketing%20and%20customer%20value%20has,have%20to%20be%20customer%20orientated](https://www.ukessays.com/essays/marketing/marketing-customer-value-and-their-relationships.php#:%7E:text=Marketing%20and%20customer%20value%20has,have%20to%20be%20customer%20orientated). [Accessed: 28-Jan-2023].
[6] Published by Erin Duffin and D. 8, “High School enrollment in the U.S. 2030,” Statista, 08-Dec-2022. [Online]. Available: <https://www.statista.com/statistics/183996/us-high-school-enrollment-in-public-and-private-institutions/>. [Accessed: 28-Jan-2023].
[7] Published by Erin Duffin and J. 27, “U.S. college enrollment and forecast 1965-2030,” Statista, 27-Jul-2022. [Online]. Available: <https://www.statista.com/statistics/183995/us-college-enrollment-and-projections-in-public-and-private-institutions/>. [Accessed: 28-Jan-2023].
[8] “Government expenditure on education, total (% of GDP),” Data. [Online]. Available: <https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.XPD.TOTL.GD.ZS>. [Accessed: 28-Jan-2023].
[9] A. Guttmann, “Global Entertainment and media market size 2026,” Statista, 27-Jul-2022. [Online]. Available: <https://www.statista.com/statistics/237749/value-of-the-global-entertainment-and-media-market/>. [Accessed: 28-Jan-2023].
[10] Commerce Institute, “How many new businesses are started each year? (2022 data),” Commerce Institute, 18-Jan-2023. [Online]. Available: <https://www.commerceinstitute.com/new-businesses-started-every-year/>. [Accessed: 28-Jan-2023].
[11] T. Gutner, “Is it time to outsource human resources?,” Entrepreneur, 14-Jan-2011. [Online]. Available: <https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/is-it-time-to-outsource-human-resources/217866>. [Accessed: 28-Jan-2023].
[12] Startup Genome, “State of the global startup economy,” Startup Genome. [Online]. Available: <https://startupgenome.com/article/state-of-the-global-startup-economy>. [Accessed: 28-Jan-2023].
[13] “Teachers,” World Bank. [Online]. Available: [https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/teachers#:~:text=There%20are%20close%20to%2085,and%2012.5%20in%20tertiary%20education](https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/teachers#:%7E:text=There%20are%20close%20to%2085,and%2012.5%20in%20tertiary%20education). [Accessed: 28-Jan-2023].
[14] “The NCES Fast Facts Tool provides quick answers to many education questions (National Center for Education Statistics),” National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Home Page, a part of the U.S. Department of Education. [Online]. Available: <https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=61>. [Accessed: 28-Jan-2023].
[15] Published by Statista Research Department and N. 23, “Global: Number of pupils in Secondary School,” Statista, 23-Nov-2022. [Online]. Available: <https://www.statista.com/statistics/1227098/number-of-pupils-in-secondary-education-worldwide/>. [Accessed: 28-Jan-2023].
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## Inspiration

A brief recap of the inspiration for Presentalk 1.0: We wanted to make it easier to navigate presentations. Handheld clickers are useful for going to the next and last slide, but they are unable to skip to specific slides in the presentation. Also, we wanted to make it easier to pull up additional information like maps, charts, and pictures during a presentation without breaking the visual continuity of the presentation. To do that, we added the ability to search for and pull up images using voice commands, without leaving the presentation.

Last year, we finished our prototype, but it was a very hacky and unclean implementation of Presentalk. After the positive feedback we heard after the event, despite our code's problems, we resolved to come back this year to make the product something we could actually host online and let everyone use.

## What it does

Presentalk solves this problem with voice commands that allow you to move forward and back, skip to specific slides and keywords, and go to specific images in your presentation using image recognition. Presentalk recognizes voice commands, including:

* Next Slide
	+ Goes to the next slide
* Last Slide
	+ Goes to the previous slide
* Go to Slide 3
	+ Goes to the 3rd slide
* Go to the slide with the dog
	+ Uses google cloud vision to parse each slide's images, and will take you to the slide it thinks has a dog in it.
* Go to the slide titled APIs
	+ Goes to the first slide with APIs in its title
* Search for "voice recognition"
	+ Parses the text of each slide for a matching phrase and goes to that slide.
* Show me a picture of UC Berkeley
	+ Uses Bing image search to find the first image result of UC Berkeley
* Zoom in on the Graph
	+ Uses Google Cloud Vision to identify an object, and if it matches the query, zooms in on the object.
* Tell me the product of 857 and 458
	+ Uses Wolfram Alpha's Short Answer API to answer computation and knowledge based questions

Video: <https://vimeo.com/chanan/calhacks3>

## How we built it

* Built a backend in python that linked to our voice recognition, which we built all of our other features off of.
## Challenges we ran into
* Accepting microphone input through Google Chrome (people can have different security settings)
* Refactor entire messy, undocumented codebase from last year

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting Presentalk from weekend pet project to something that could actually scale with many users on a server in yet another weekend.

## What we learned

* Sometimes the best APIs are hidden right under your nose. (Web Speech API was released in 2013 and we didn't use it last year. It's awesome!)
* Re-factoring code you don't really remember is difficult.
## What's next for Presentalk
Release to the general public! (Hopefully)
## Inspiration

As programmers, we collectively realized how much we disliked the process of creating a pitch site/landing page to explain our project - it took away precious time from working on the actual product! We recognized our shared need for a quick landing page solution, which would sum up the basics of our project, idea, and solution for any viewer to understand.

## What it does

MyLandingPage creates a landing page site for an emerging project within seconds. Based on an elevator pitch of a project, MyLandingPage uses Cohere's large language model to generate informative copy for the website (the headline, product description, benefits/solutions, and a call to action).

## How we built it

We used MongoDB, Express, React, Node, Typescript, Cohere, Google Cloud Platform, CICD, and AppEngine in order to create our final product.

## Challenges we ran into

We struggled to think of an idea early on in our coding process. We initially wanted to create a texting device with vision-tracking glasses, or use NLP to summarize complex textbooks into simpler text, and didn't come up with our final idea until Saturday morning. We also struggled to delegate all aspects of the project among our team members, and manage our time efficiently in order to get everything before the due date. However, we got better at settling on our main idea/problem statement and figured out how to allocate roles efficiently between the four team members.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

* Finishing a prototype for demo day.
* Starting off our coding by defining the problem and empathizing with our users, rather than starting off with the software product.
* Being able to whip together a successful NLP model in such a short amount of time.
* Successfully creating a clean user interface for the prototype.

## What we learned

It's important to have a plan early on in the development process: not just for our project itself, but for who is ultimately responsible for which aspect of the project, and how long we want to allocate to each aspect of the project. It's also a good idea to refer back to our team members' areas of expertise when we're trying to create a project in such a short period of time (e.g. one of our members has past experience working with NLP text generation, so we should have recognized this as a competitive advantage within our project earlier)!

## What's next for MyLandingPage

1. The option to customize the landing page by making edits/additions to the text and images, altering the placement of elements on the website, etc.
2. Giving users the option to personalize their domain, allowing for the sharability of the site.
3. A slideshow/pitch deck generation as an add-on to our landing site generation, to allow hackers + entrepreneurs to easily pitch to entrepreneurs.