Alpha Words

Alpha Words 2024

Inspiration

I love to read and learn new vocabulary. Over the past years I participated in the Spelling Bee competitions and always wanted to write my own original stories like the hundreds of books that I have completed and liked. Alpha Words provides learners with a unique platform to learn new vocabulary and use it in their own original creative writing stories in multiple languages.

What it does

Alpha Words app helps users to learn a new language or increase their fluency in spoken languages, reading, and creative writing by providing thousands of the most used vocabularies in seven different languages, English, Mandarin, Latin, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Italian, plus providing a platform to publish your original creative writing stories in 6 languages across 175 countries.

How we built it

In coding this app, I used Apple XCODE ver 14.3 and ver 15, Swift UI, and Swift programming language to make the app available on all Apple devices. I also used Python, JSON, and Google Cloud to build the vocabulary database used in the app. Plus Artificial Intelligence Generative technologies from Llama 2.0, Google Bard, and OpenAI to organize and build the Mandarin language and the Latin Language sections.

Challenges we ran into

It was very challenging to complete this project due to the complexity of making all these technologies seamlessly work together, however the most complicated problem that I faced was when I upgraded from XCODE 14.3 to XCODE 15 to support iOS 17 and faced a software bug inside XCODE 15 related to TTS that is currently under investigation by Apple. I had to readjust the whole build to find a work around and make the app work on iOS 17 until Apple finds a solution for this bug.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Mandarin is the most spoken native language in the world with over 1.1 billion speakers and Alpha Words Mandarin section covers all USA level 1 vocabularies in Mandarin along with its Pinyin to speed up Mandarin pronunciation for none native speakers. Alpha Words app also covers the most used 1,200 Mandarin characters from HSK, the Chinese Proficiency Test that covers understanding about 94% of the most used Chinese characters in China.

Latin is an ancient great language that is currently embedded into more than 40% of the English Language, and more than 90% of the Medical, Technology, and Judicial English terminologies. Latin also evolved into Romance Languages that are currently spoken by over 1.2 billion speakers. Alpha Words App covers the most used Latin vocabularies and mapping it with English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, and Mandarin.

Providing a creative writing platform for other students to use to publish their work.

What we learned

In creative coding work like this, technical features rarely work from the first or second or even tenth attempt. We need to keep trying in different creative ways until we eventually achieve what we are looking forward to build.

What's next for Alpha Words

More features that I’d like to add to Alpha Words App including:

An interactive gaming element to provide testing for users to practice their vocabulary, spelling, grammar and sentence writing with a scaling system that can compare users based on their language fluency.
Increase the Latin section by adding several specialized additions for the Latin terminologies that are heavily used in the Medical, Technology, and Judicial fields.
Add a section for the Greek language because of its heavy contribution in the scientific and technological fields.