Mappit!

Inspiration

Information today is increasingly consumed through audio—lectures, meetings, podcasts, and interviews—but audio is inherently linear and difficult to revisit. We were inspired by the question: what if spoken ideas could be transformed into structured, visual workflows automatically?
We wanted to help students, researchers, and creators turn dense audio into something explorable, skimmable, and actionable.

What it does

Mappit! takes an audio file as input and automatically generates a visual flowchart representing the key ideas, concepts, and relationships discussed in the audio. Instead of reading long transcripts, users can explore a structured graph that highlights major themes while still preserving supporting details.

How we built it

We designed Mappit! as a modular pipeline powered by AI agents:

• Speech-to-text using Whisper to generate accurate transcripts
• Concept extraction agents that identify topics, subtopics, and relationships
• Node generation agents that create raw graph nodes from extracted concepts
• Cleaning and filtering logic to reduce noise and organize the graph
• Frontend visualization using an interactive flowchart interface to display nodes and edges
  Each agent operates independently, acting like a function in the pipeline. This made the system easier to debug, extend, and iterate on under hackathon constraints.

Setup

Prerequisites

• Node.js (v14 or higher) and npm
• Python (v3.8 or higher) and pip
• FFmpeg (required for audio processing)

Installation

1. Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/yourusername/mappit.git
cd mappit

2. Backend Setup

cd backend
pip install -r requirements.txt

3. Frontend Setup

cd frontend
npm install

4. Environment Variables

Create a .env file in the backend directory with the following variables:

OPENAI_API_KEY=your_openai_api_key_here
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=your_anthropic_api_key_here  # if using Claude

5. Run the Application

Start the backend server:

cd backend
python api.py

In a new terminal, start the frontend:

cd frontend
npm start

The app should now be running at http://localhost:3000

What's next for Mappit!

• Introduce hierarchical abstraction, grouping minor nodes under higher-level concepts
• Add importance scoring so only the most relevant ideas appear by default
• Improve graph layout and clustering for readability
• Improve connections between nodes
• Enable live usage, such as live streams or real-time video conferencing