Startup creates lecture summaries from Panopto

Following the winding paths professors sometimes take in lectures can be hard, and revising from recordings of those lectures can be harder. That’s the problem that StudyCap founders and University of Bath students Ruben and Vas aim to solve with their AI Panopto lecture program.

The StudyCap website offers ‘intelligent’ summaries, lecture-tailored Q&As for revision and personalised study plans.

I spoke with Ruben about the technology and the aims behind the startup. StudyCap’s aim is to “make people want to study” by creating summaries and notes freeing people up from needing to focus on taking notes and cutting through the “fluff”.

The startup was founded in April of 2025 and built by the pair over the summer. Originally launched in July, the product was recalled to adjust for user feedback and relaunched a few weeks ago. It currently has around 200 users from across the UK.

StudyCap is a Google extension which collects the captions automatically generated by Panopto and uses a custom API to call ChatGPT, which creates the summaries from the captions. The programs then turns the raw ChatGPT output into accessible notes. All the lecture data is stored locally, so StudyCap doesn’t collect it. They advertise a paid ‘Student’ plan on their website, but Ruben tells me all their features are currently available for free to collect user feedback and refine the product before providing a paid service.

The goal of StudyCap is not to replace lecture attendance or watching lectures on Panopto. They target especially people who don’t attend lectures in person, because they, unlike students who do attend in person, can’t ask the lecturer questions to improve their understanding. StudyCap allows students to pose questions about the lecture to the AI. In the future, they hope to expand to make the platform more accessible to students with ADHD by introducing gamification. They also want to make it more visually attractive and introduce “just the essentials” summaries.

They also want to create a social “ecosystem” on the platform, encouraging students to interact with each other while studying.

The use of AI for lecture revision raises some concerns. ChatGPT is known to hallucinate approximately 30% of the time, according both to independent reviews and OpenAI’s own statements. Ruben claimed that their summaries are “scarily accurate”.

There is also the worry that students will over-rely on AI summaries rather than creating their own notes, or worse, watching the lectures at all. One interviewed Imperial lecturer said, “I think it would be very helpful for the students, [but] it can be very dangerous because of mistakes in interpretation by ChatGPT”.

He recommended that “this shouldn’t replace taking notes, it should be used as an extra tool” and emphasised the importance of attending or watching lectures.
StudyCap is one part of the explosion of AI on college campuses. We will have to wait to see where it leads.