As American students in Montreal, we did not understand a lot of the French words we saw around town. The Google Translate app on our smartphones would be an excellent solution if we had access to the internet. Unfortunately, almost all of the wifi networks around town were password protected, and data roaming is $20/mb. We needed to make a cheap solution that would allow us to translate French words to English. We decided to make i speak american. Simply text a word or phrase in French to (832) 626-4149, and it will instantly reply the message sent in English. Not only does our service support French, but it also supports every language that is supported by Google Translate. This service gives us quick and cheap access to Google Translate in countries where data roaming is too expensive and wifi is not always available. This service can also be very useful to tourists in underdeveloped countries that do not have mobile internet access.
We used Twilio to send the text messages and hosted the application using DigitalOcean. Our code is open source on GitHub.
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