Smart Study Buddy

Smart Study Buddy Dashboard — track progress, plan studies, and stay motivated.

*Inspiration * Studying often feels overwhelming — scattered notes, forgotten deadlines, and endless PDFs make it hard to stay organized. We wanted to create a simple but powerful companion that helps students study smarter, not harder.

*What it does * Smart Study Buddy is an AI-powered learning companion that combines everything students need in one place:

Dashboard: Tracks study streaks, quizzes, completed tasks, and upcoming reminders.
AI Chat: Upload notes or PDFs and instantly ask questions to better understand the material. Powered by Google Cloud Vertex AI for conversational understanding and Elastic Search for fast, accurate retrieval of information.
Quiz Generator: Creates quizzes from uploaded files using Vertex AI’s generative capabilities to test your knowledge.
Study Plans & Reminders: Organize tasks by priority (high, medium, low) and never miss a deadline.
Motivation: Visual stats and streaks keep learners consistent and engaged.

How we built it ** Frontend: React + TailwindCSS for a clean, modern interface
Backend: Node.js + Express for APIs
AI: **Google Cloud Vertex AI for chat and quiz generation
Search: Elastic Search for document indexing and hybrid retrieval
Hosting: Vercel for deployment
Collaboration: GitHub for version control

Challenges we ran into ** Integrating **Elastic Search with Google Cloud Vertex AI to deliver accurate answers.
Parsing PDFs effectively for semantic search.
Managing multiple features (dashboard, AI chat, reminders) within a short timeframe.
Balancing simplicity with functionality to keep the UI clean.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of ** Built a fully working AI-powered study assistant using **Google Cloud and Elastic.
Designed a dashboard that makes studying more organized and motivating.
Implemented quiz generation and reminders to cover multiple student needs.

What we learned
We learned how to integrate AI and search technologies into real-world education tools, how to design user-friendly dashboards, and how to prioritize essential features for maximum impact.

*What’s next for Smart Study Buddy * Flashcard generation from uploaded notes.
Support for Word, PowerPoint, and more file types.
Collaborative study mode for group learning.