Ablebot

Discord bot using a custom ML model to help disabled individuals with interactions on Discord.

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Inspiration

As Discord becomes more and more of a general-purpose communication platform instead of one tailored specifically for gamers, adding accessibility features becomes increasingly crucial. Discord is now not only being used by the gaming community but also from school clubs to therapy groups and everything in between.

We were inspired by the fact that we do not see many, disabled or impaired people in Discord servers. We thought about how we can help them and realized that not only does Discord not have many accessibility features, but the limited features they do have do not cater toward the majority of disabled/impaired individuals. We also found out that there are currently no Discord bots aimed at helping these people.

What it does

Ablebot aides disabled and impaired individuals in communication with others. We targeted hearing impaired, speech impaired and motor impaired people by transcribing voice chat speech, creating a text-to-speech system, and adding voice commands. Transcriptions help the hearing impaired interact with other users in voice channels by allowing them to follow the flow of conversation. Text to speech helps speech impaired individuals participate in conversations they would normally not be able to participate in, and voice commands help the motor impaired finish tasks without the hassle of using their keyboard. More detailed information can be found on the Github README.

How we built it

We built this product with blood, sweat and tears on the backbone of awesomeness and dedication.

Challenges we ran into

  • Time zone issues with individuals across the world made it harder to communicate quickly. We had to use our limited meeting time to connect and share ideas efficiently and effectively. Our project is built on the collaboration of each team member, and sharing feedback was crucial in refining our product. This back-and-forth for each variation of design and iteration of versions meant our wildly different time zones delayed our communication.
  • We also had teammate issues. A couple members of our team quiet quit despite being assigned tasks, leaving us to pick up the extra work required. Our combined passion and dedication helped us put in the extra hours needed to create this compelling product.
  • When we started, we had no idea of any technology we used. We had to learn Discord's confusing and sometimes poorly documented API, work with a relatively unfamiliar backend framework and delve into audio signal processing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are exceptionally proud of the fact that this project is in production. We set out to create something interesting and ended up building an idea into a software that other people can use and rely on.

Instead of writing messy code and presenting that, we held ourselves to the highest standard and wrote code with scalability and durability into consideration. In our minds, this is not just a hackathon project, but a product we will continue to develop afterward.

We also uploaded the website permanently and will find a way to permanently host the bot depending on outside support.

What we learned

We learned a lot from this project.

What's next for Ablebot

All future plans are laid out in our Github README.

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