Gatherwords

Inspiration

As an avid language learner, I often find myself surrounded by words and phrases I hope to forage: trips to other countries, visits to my friends' homes, conversations with strangers from a different language background... but in those moments, the nuggets of language slip by as I scramble to capture them. Flipping through notebook scribbles, copy and pasting into google translate, pulling out my camera, starting a voice recording - information is scattered across different locations, with no mechanism for error correction or review. I was not learning.

What it does

Enters Gatherwords - a minimalist tool that allows you to collect language content from a variety of channels. You can have the app listen to a coversation, look at a street sign, analyze your text messages, and receive your manual additions. Gatherwords' minimalist interface ensures that you won't need to fumble to capture passing speech or text. All the information is remixed into multiple choice questions, flashcards and fill-in-the-blank exercises to maximize your learning. Whether you're in an immersion environment, or talking to another language learner, Gatherwords can be your pocket companion.

How we built it

I built Gatherwords with my second teammate, Codex.

Challenges we ran into

I didn't expect to build the app solo, and ran into a lot of obstacles with configurating Linq and OpenAI APIs. But I persisted in debugging and sought to understand the problem.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is my first mobile app!

What we learned

Think of the problem before the solution - would I actually use the app I built?

What's next for Gatherwords

• add more ways to forage - e.g. video calls, meetings and lessons
• more fine grained linguistic analysis
• multilingual support
  • code-switching in listen mode
  • multiple languages in one frame in observe mode
• buttons to play audio during review - the audio files are already saved, just not accessed
• localized interface - makes more sense for a language learning app

Built With

• cloudflare
• codex
• expo.io
• google-cloud-translation
• google-cloud-vision
• linq
• openai
• react-native