The Problem
Foreign language literacy in America is lacking compared to the rest of the world - around 80% of Americans can only speak one language, while many other developed countries such as Singapore, Germany, the Netherlands and more have achieved almost 100% multilingual rates. Yet, despite the US's lack of foreign language literacy, younger generations increasingly show an interest in foreign pop culture -- the widespread appeal of Japanese Anime and Korean KPop serve as just few examples of the proliferation of foreign content today.
What if there were a way to bridge this gap between foreign language illiteracy and foreign cultural interest?
What is Flashpopz?
Inspired by our own love for anime and Japanese culture, our team has built a language learning tool that teaches flashcards based on the vocabulary used in popular anime shows. The flashcards are automatically generated from episode subtitles and presented in a slick and interactive user interface.
How did we build it?
First, we performed data preprocessing and cleaning by pulling english subtitle files of an anime, removing the timestamps and converting them to text. Next we used Azure’s Key Phrasing API which did a great job of identifying important words beyond open source models we’ve used so far. Then we used Azure’s Translation API to translate the key words we identified into Japanese. Unfortunately in order to pull the hiragana phonetic spelling, we had to use a Japanese API hosted by Goo. After we pulled all this data we used Azure’s Text to Speech tool to provide audio files for each Japanese term which can be used to enhance the language learning experience. After uploading all this data to Firebase, we used React to create a web app and pull the audio files and translation data from our Firebase Database and Storage.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.