Flexible Translator

• 

  Audio translation working

• 

  Text translation working

Inspiration

We noticed that people were using messenger to make new friends from all around the globe, and us being international friends that speak different languages, found that communicating what we wanted to say was very challenging for us.

Not only that, but using voice messages and translating them was also impossible. So we decided to make a change and bring a better way to communicate with international friends on messenger.

What it does

First, users must select what language they speak and the language they wish to translate to.

• _ Text: _ Users can send a text message to the bot, and it will reply a translated version so they can forward to the friend they are talking to. All without leaving messenger.

• _ Voice messages: _ Users can send voice messages in English, and it will reply the translated version of the audio in text form.

How we built it

We developed it using Node, some Facebook tools, IBM Watson, and a speech to text library.

Challenges we ran into

• We only found this hackathon 2 days before the deadline, so coding it all in little time was a challenge
• The audio-to-text library we planned to use had bugs, so we had to fix those.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're really proud that we could get this to work very well in such little time, also really proud of how easy we made it to use.

What we learned

• Learned that messenger can be a great tool for international friends to talk to each other
• Learned how to make a messenger bot

What's next for Flexible Translation

• Use the power of neural networks to generate real speech synthesis for audio translation, that way users can send voice message and it will return a translated voice message they can forward to friends.
• Implement speech recognition with voice messages for more languages

Built With

• bottender
• ibm-watson
• javascript
• node.js