Скачать или смотреть VERBATIM Demo – Hack Without Borders 2025

Introducing Project for Hack Without Borders 2025: VERBATIM.

Inspiration:

We were inspired by the idea of creating a tool that bridges the gap between the visual and auditory worlds — a lightweight assistant that can see and speak. From helping visually impaired users to simply reading a handwritten note aloud, the idea of combining OCR (Optical Character Recognition) with text-to-speech felt both useful and achievable within a beginner hackathon.

What it does:

Verbatim captures live video using the user's webcam, extracts an image every 2 seconds, uses Easy OCR to recognize any text in the image, and then reads the text aloud using a built-in voice assistant (pyttsx3). It avoids reading the same text multiple times by storing previously spoken content, and automatically deletes processed images to keep the system tidy.

How we built it:

Python: core language for scriptinG
OpenCV: to capture webcam frames
Easy OCR: to perform text recognition (OCR)
pyttsx3: to convert recognized text into speech
VS Code: our development environment We also used file I/O to track previously spoken text and ensure no duplicates were read.
Challenges we ran into:

Getting Easy OCR to work consistently across systems (especially on macOS)
Dealing with image noise and poor lighting that reduced OCR accuracy
Finding the ideal probability threshold to accept as valid words
Making sure text-to-speech was clear, real-time, and non-blocking
Keeping the code modular and clean while adding new features quickly
Accomplishments that we're proud of:

We built a full working pipeline from image capture → text recognition → voice output
Our system runs fully offline
It’s beginner-friendly and requires minimal setup
We made it modular enough to be expandable in the future
We kept the project simple, practical, and focused
What we learned:

How to integrate computer vision and text-to-speech in real-time
Dealing with cross-platform dependencies and performance bottlenecks (lack of GPU)
The importance of efficient file handling and memory management in live-streamed apps
How much small automations can help people in accessibility use cases
That even simple tools can be powerful when built with purpose
What's next for Verbatim:

Add translation support (e.g. English → French)
Integrate with mobile devices using a lightweight app or API
Export spoken content to audio files