Allison interviews Jenn Sponer from Jamworks about their note-taking app for personalized study experiences. Jamworks records a spoken lecture off of the student’s device (e.g., a laptop or mobile phone) and then uses that recording to create notes in several selectable formats for better understanding.
Jamworks has special features that aid disabled students in consuming and understanding their notes. It also works well for people without disabilities. It offers several selectable accessibility profiles that tailor the presentation of notes to the student. Examples of these profiles are Vision Impairment, ADHD Friendly, Cognitive Disability, Seizure Safe, Keyboard Navigation (Motor), and Blind Users (Screen Reader). Jamworks can also convert transcribed text to a version with better readability for people with dyslexia.
Jamworks has several additional key features that make it an effective note-taking app. It can differentiate who the speaker is and, if selected by the user, only allow the instructor’s words to be transcribed. Jamworks will transcribe spoken STEM formulas to actual formulas with mathematical symbols. Using key points from the lecture, it can convert a block of words into an outline. And using the lecture notes, Jamworks can even generate quizzes from the lecture material and grade the quizzes.
The Jamworks app runs equally well on Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, and Chrome devices.
Learn more at https://www.jamworks.com/
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Transcript of Interview:
Allison: Jenn Sponor from Jamworks says that she loves being on podcasts. She goes on them all the time. She’s from Jamworks. No, actually what she said was, “I’ve never been on a podcast before.” Here is your debut today.
Jenn Sponor: Yeah, my first time on a podcast. There you go.
Allison: All right. So, Jamworks is a note-taking environment for students. Is that correct?
Jenn Sponor: That’s right. We are a note-taking app. We’ve been around about five years. We were founded for the education space, which makes us very unique in this field. We were created for the disabled learner. We’re based out of the UK. We are used by what’s called DSA students in the UK. The government gives its disabled services, but they get a government fund to use us. We’ve now come into the US. We’ve been in the US a couple years now, and this is our biggest market.
Allison: You sell to the universities?
Jenn Sponor: We sell to a couple hundred universities, everything from a community college all the way up to the Ivies. Mostly they’re disabled.
Allison: So, you describe this as a note-taking app where it can take a video from a video class and it can do a translation, make the transcript of it. And I asked you, “Well, how is that any different than in Apple Notes I can do the same thing?” And you had a good answer to that.
Jenn Sponor: So what we do is we record off of the student’s device. And what makes us different, because we are built for the education space and we understand things like STEM, translate to languages, but more importantly, we then use AI to give the student a really detailed outline set of notes. Divided into new topics. We also have technology that a lot of the schools use to differentiate who the speaker is and will only allow the instructor if that’s what the university wants or the student wants. So all the other stuff comes out and you have speaker one and that’s all that’s coming into your notes.
Allison: Okay, that’s interesting. Now, we’ve got a screen here on a Mac showing the transcript and you clicked a button here that changed it to being a font that’s good for people with dyslexia, correct?
Jenn Sponor: Yeah, so it’s called Focus Reading. So it takes it from, that’s your normal, right? And then you go in and it bolds the first couple letters. And I find, I mean, slightly maybe undiagnosed dyslexia, that it makes it, it really pops out. It’s almost, it allows you to skim.
Allison: I wonder whether we all could have a little bit of benefit because I noticed that with some dyslexic fonts the other day. I was like, whoa, I can read that better too. So maybe we can all benefit from it. But even more so for people who have some issues there. So now you also looked at, show me the key points here.
Jenn Sponor: Yeah, so this is the, as I said, just the transcription. Then you go over to key points and it takes it from just block words to an outline, right?
Allison: Clicked a little too hard.
Jenn Sponor: An outline. So you’ve got an outline and then you see all those STEM formulas transcribing perfectly into the right equation, as you pointed out.
Allison: Yeah, so we looked at the straight transcript and it would say something like the letter X space P-R-I-M-E and this says X prime. It’s actually a real equation. So that’s part of being focused on the STEM education that you’re creating these formulas.
Jenn Sponor: Yes, and the AI, all the AI strength behind it.
Allison: I have to ask you, how well do you check whether that actually works? Because getting a formula wrong is much worse than getting a typo in a word.
Jenn Sponor: Well, I’m going to ask Lewis, who’s our expert on, how do we know that our STEM is accurate?
Allison: We’re phoning a friend here. We’ve got Lewis Maskell from Jamworks coming in. Yeah, so having a typo in a word is not a big deal or getting a, what is it, a phoneme? What is it? T-O-O versus T-W-O. That doesn’t matter. So getting the formula wrong, that matters a lot.
Lewis Maskell: Yeah, sure. So it’s 96% accurate. So that’s the accuracy rate. And we also have transcription and key points editing. So you can basically change it if it was incorrect, but it’s 96% accurate.
Allison: So overall or with formulas, it’s 96%?
Lewis Maskell: Overall. So for both. So for the text and for the formulas.
Allison: So how do I know if you got the formula wrong if I’m a student?
Lewis Maskell: How do you know if I got the, because you’d, well, because it would be in the recording, in the video from the teacher.
Allison: Okay, so you still have to pay attention to the teacher. Darn it, that’s the problem.
Lewis Maskell: The whole is pretty accurate. We’ve not had any students say anything.
Jenn Sponor: We haven’t actually had anyone come back, and we’ve been used by some pretty technical schools. I mean, this is a—
Allison: So no bridges fell down because somebody got the wrong—
Jenn Sponor: This is a Stanford lecture, and there’s a lot in there, and that all came out. Because we did, that is checked, and that was 100% accurate.
Allison: Oh, great, great. So the other thing you said that you can do with this is have quizzes, right?
Jenn Sponor: Yes, yes. So you can go into your quiz function, which is… So over here, on this side, is your little bot. So you can ask it questions like, I don’t know, give me a good engineering question to ask us about—
Allison: Oh, I don’t know what the lecture is about, so—
Jenn Sponor: About special relativity?
Allison: Do you want to ask a question, Steve?
Steve: Is it possible to travel greater than the speed of light?
Allison: All right, we’re going to watch her type this in. This is going to take a second here. So she’s typing in, is it possible to travel quicker than the speed of light into the AI here? And let’s see what it has to say.
Jenn Sponor: A little jam assistant.
Allison: This is flying without a net here. Jam assistant says, oh, it’s giving us a formula and everything here. Let’s see.
Steve: Therefore, based on our current understanding of physics and the principles discussed in the lecture, faster than light travel is not possible.
Allison: But it actually—
Jenn Sponor: That’s the conclusion.
Allison: That’s awesome. But it also gave the Lorentz factor here and gave a bunch of information about what the lecture had just described. Good job on the question, Steve.
Jenn Sponor:: Now, I also mentioned—
Allison Boy, that’s impressive. That was a live demo gone well.
Jenn Sponor:: There’s a quiz. So now the quiz is going to come off your key points and then, right, what is the observed speed? And so then quiz is you can answer it and then it’s going to tell you the answer. And let’s say there’s your answer. I don’t know why I keep doing that. And if you said, I really don’t understand that. Well, here you go. You can go back and you can watch the highlight. Now the reason we have the highlight on this, this is integrated with something, a learning management system, an LMS. And this is Panopto. So they have, Stanford has allowed Panopto to record and visually record the lecture.
Allison: Let me describe what we just saw. So she was on a screen that had a quiz and it had a question and we could have tried to answer the question but we said, no, just give me the answer. And then she clicked another button and it has popped up a video showing the lecturer explaining that exact thing in the lecture.
Jenn Sponor: And if let’s say you’re doing that as a student and you’re only doing the audio, then it would just give you a link to that section in audio. So you can listen to the instructor say it again in his own words.
Allison: Or her own words.
Jenn Sponor: Their own words. Are we correct?
Allison: Their own words. There we go. This is really cool. So if you’re in a university and could be looking at ways to improve the educational experience for people with disabilities, people who just stink at taking their own notes, people who need help taking more quizzes for themselves, they would go to jamworks.com.
Jenn Sponor: But the other thing is the traditional student market is really growing for us because as you probably remember, you’re busy, busy writing notes down in class and you feel like you missed the lecture because you’re too busy writing.
Allison I took really good notes and learned hardly anything.
Jenn Sponor:: Exactly. And then you just said what just happened. And so the thing you can do which is really amazing in this is you can take basic notes, you write a couple of phrases down. And then you hit a button called enhance notes and it comes in and it fills in all your notes around that, keeping what you wrote bolded so you remember because I know writing something down sticks in your brain.
Allison: Right, right, right. But just a little bit. If you write too much down, nothing sticks in your brain.
Jenn Sponor: And so I think that’s a really good happy medium of keeping the student engaged so they’re not looking out the window knowing everything’s done. But it’s been great. We work with screen readers for the blind. We’re really compatible.
Allison: Platform independent? Windows and Mac?
Jenn Sponor: Windows and Mac.
Allison: And iPhone, Android?
Jenn Sponor: iPhone, Android, Chrome, anything. We really work across Chromebooks.
Allison: Very good, very good.
Jenn Sponor: You’re better than me on this. And then the last thing I wanted to show you was this is quite cool. If you were to go back and look at, let’s say, let’s go to key points. And you can go in and you can, this is the accessibility. And you can pick all kinds of, how do you want your profile to look? And the student can set that up if they want.
Allison: Let me read these. So she’s got, you can turn on seizure safe profile, vision impaired profile, ADHD profile, cognitive, keyboard navigation, blind, all different profiles to see how you want to interact with the tool.
Jenn Sponor: Yes, exactly.
Allison: Very good. All right. This is jam-packed at jamworks.com.
Jenn Sponor: Thank you for interviewing us.
Allison: You did great.