Clarify

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Inspiration

Clarify was inspired by a deeply personal struggle. Two of our teammates have ADHD and often find it difficult to focus during class. We know what it's like to try our best to pay attention, only to zone out and miss important parts of a lesson — and then feel lost when it’s time to study or take a test. We realized that many other students face the same challenge, and we wanted to build something that could support them. That’s where the idea for Clarify was born: a tool to help neurodivergent students better process and retain what’s taught in class.

What it does

Clarify is a mobile app that records classroom lectures and uses AI to automatically generate a summarized breakdown of what was covered. After recording a lesson, the app provides:

A summary of key points
The structure of the lecture
Potential test questions
A glossary of important terms
And a personalized study plan

This lets students review at their own pace in a format designed to reduce overwhelm and boost comprehension — especially for students with ADHD or other learning differences.

How we built it

We used a modern tech stack to bring Clarify to life:

React Native + Expo for a seamless cross-platform mobile app experience
TypeScript for improved safety and maintainability across our codebase
Express for the backend API, handling recordings and processing
And NLP (Natural Language Processing) to generate smart, concise summaries from recorded lectures

This stack allowed us to focus on delivering a clean user experience while building powerful, AI-enhanced functionality behind the scenes. We also chose technologies that are widely used by modern companies and development teams, ensuring our app is built on industry-standard tools that scale well and are easy to maintain.

Challenges we ran into

One of our biggest challenges was managing time — we had a lot of features we wanted to build, but not enough hours to structure everything as modularly and cleanly as we hoped. Integrating audio processing and NLP in a short timeframe was also complex, especially when trying to make summaries both accurate and useful for test prep. Coordinating front-end and back-end work across the team was another hurdle, but we managed to pull it off by staying organized and adapting quickly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re really proud that we were able to take a problem we experience personally and build a working solution in such a short time. Despite the challenges, we created an app that’s functional, clean, and genuinely helpful — and one that we would actually use ourselves. We’re also proud of how well we collaborated as a team, balancing our strengths to bring Clarify together.

What we learned

We learned a lot about working with audio data, implementing NLP, and building a full-stack mobile app in a time-sensitive environment. On the soft skills side, we learned how to work around each other’s strengths, communicate effectively, and pivot quickly when certain ideas didn’t pan out. Most importantly, we learned how to turn our own challenges into opportunities to help others.

What's next for Clarify

Next, we want to:

Add user accounts so students can save recordings and summaries across devices
Improve the accuracy and customization of summaries
Include highlighting and visual aids for users with different learning styles
Partner with schools or accessibility programs to test Clarify in real classrooms
And continue refining the UI to ensure it’s ADHD-friendly, calming, and distraction-free

We believe Clarify can truly make a difference — not just for students with ADHD, but for anyone who feels overwhelmed in a traditional classroom. We’re excited to keep building.