Last summer, third-year computer science student Arshia Eslami had the idea of creating a website to make studying easy for students. A website that could make flashcards almost instantly, saving those time from having to type them out.
It wasn't until this semester when third-year computer science student Julia Grove, fourth-year computer science student Matt Linder and Eslami all decided to create JAMAi, a new artificial intelligence toolbox to help individuals make flashcards faster for studying.
The name JAMAi comes from the first initial of each member with Ai added to the end of it.
Students are able to upload their notes, PowerPoints and PDFs, whether digital or handwritten, and have flashcards created for them almost instantly through JAMAi.
Linder said their goal was particularly to help those either in double majors, the medicine field or majors that require a lot of memorization, as the program can create hundreds of flashcards straight from one's notes.
Eslami said this idea came from an app called Anki that he would use for flashcards, and then they expanded on that idea by adding artificial intelligence (AI) to help make the flashcards instead.
“The process of creating flashcards, it takes time ... And then we figured out, 'Oh, how would it look if you can have a tool that creates a flashcard from the notes?'” Eslami said.
According to Eslami, the AI acts behind the scenes each time the user sends in a request, whether that be notes, PowerPoints, etc to provide the output for the user in real time.
While the group has had the idea since this past summer, they didn’t start working on it until about a month ago, Linder said. Over the last two weeks, the group has used their own knowledge on topics to build the website, Eslami said.
The first step when building the website was picking out the language and framework and also thinking about how to make it as user-friendly as possible, Linder said. The goal was to make the website as simple and easy as possible to navigate when uploading notes so the users can get their flashcards fast, Linder said.
Each member played a different but important role in building and creating the website, Linder said.
"We all had a hand in the technical side of things. I think Arshia was particularly good at managing people and helping us decide what exactly everyone should do. I did a lot of the front-end side of things what users see, making things look pretty, and Julia did a lot of the AI prompting," Linder said.
The AI that the group used within the website is called Gemini and is an "already-trained large language model," Grove said.
According to Eslami, with Gemini being a Large Language Model (LLM), the AI has a broad understanding of general knowledge. With this, the AI is very powerful and is able to create structured prompts that give the exact output that is needed, according to Eslami.
This means that when the user sends in their request of notes, PowerPoints or anything else they want turned into flashcards, the AI will create that for the user in real time.
“What we do to actually get the output is we use what's called prompt engineering to create basically a prompt to provide us exactly what we want as the output,” Grove said.
Gemini was created by Google to be a multimodal model. This the means the AI is able to understand, operate and combine different types of information such as text, code, images and much more, according to a Google blog.
Eslami said the group went through a couple of iterations before they felt the website was working at its best.
“At the beginning, it was like, 'Oh, it's not doing as well as we want,' or at the beginning, you couldn’t upload handwritten notes,” Eslami said. “But then we figured out how to scan something from your notes and then you upload and it works very very well.”
While the website is now up and running for people to use, the group originally wasn’t familiar with the business side of making the website, Eslami said. The group had to learn how to get a limited liability company and how to securely process credit and debit card payments as well, Eslami said.
Now, when a user creates an account, they will be given two payment options based on how long they want to use it. Users can purchase a monthly subscription for $4.99 that gives them an unlimited amount of flashcard usage for a one-month period. Users can also purchase a yearly subscription for $49.99 for unlimited flashcard generation as well.
“We’re still kind of figuring things out as we’re going like how to distribute it to more people and how to get people to actually use our website and not just say ‘Oh this is cool,’ but actually start using it,” Eslami said.
Linder said he sent the website out to a friend, who used it to create flashcards for one of his classes.
“For me, it was really motivating to see people's reactions,” Linder said. “One of my friends back home studies exercise science ... So I had him upload his notes for one flashcard generator and he got like 100 flashcards back. Just seeing his reaction ... Made me want to write more code.”
Grove said once the website was completed, the group was more confident to share it and let people use it. She also said they are excited to potentially add more to it and scale up its capabilities as well.
“I think just as a whole, how fast we kind of started this and were actually able to show people was really impressive to me,” Grove said. “I feel like the idea of starting a business ... seems like a lot, but if you just use your time properly and work hard, I think it's not as scary as it sounds.”