Inspiration
My Grandmother is 99 years old and for the last 20 years has not been able to hear very well. She did not want to get a hearing aid and therefore the only we have to communicate with her is through writing. We write out questions and she speaks back to us. This works for the most part, but it is very time-consuming and we often miss things. A common scenario is we are in the mitts of writing out a reply to one of her questions, but then she's moved on to a new topic or question, making it difficult to keep up.
What it does
I wanted to create a simple application that would allow us to have a conversation at close to normal speed, where she could ask me something and read my reply as I speak it. I have also made the UI a little more friendly for her to use. As you can imagine at 99 she's not tech savvy in the slightest and therefore creating big buttons, having a few fonts for her to see which is more pleasant for her to read, and a way to make it dark mode if that helps with readability.
How we built it
Built it using Assembly AI and NextJS. Started by getting comfortable with the Assembly AI real-time endpoint, then decided whats the best features needed for this problem.
Challenges we ran into
Sometimes the connection to AssemblyAI would not work on the first go.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Happy to have got an MVP project done using AI technology.
What we learned
I learned it was quite easy to get connected to the assembly AI API and get decent results in a short period of time.
What's next for Hearsay
I wasn't able to get it to my Grandmother yet, but later today I am going to visit and see it work in action. If it works, it will be of great help to my family and the nurses at the resthome.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.