Language Transcender

Talk face to face, no matter the language! Human communication transcends language

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Inspiration

I listen to kpop, and kpop artists like to do livestreams to communicate with their fans worldwide. The only problem is... I don't speak Korean, and nor do many kpop fans since most of us are from all sorts of different countries! And the subtitles to the livestreams get uploaded way too long after the livestream has finished. Because of the waiting I have to do in order to understand the livestreams, and because of the various languages that other fellow kpop fans speak, I was inspired to try and create a video chat web app that has real time subtitling so we could all communicate with one another in real time.

What it does

It's a video chatting web app. First, someone starts up a chat room. This person can then share the link with their multilingual friends. After that, each person who has the link just chooses their language from the preparatory page and get directed to the video chat room. Now, no matter the language, you can communicate with your friends because right under their video chat window, there are real time subtitles in your chosen language!

How I built it

I used Node.js for routing, authentication token generation, and importing modules that I needed to use. IBM Watson had helpful APIs that enabled me to translate the speech into text for the subtitles. The API I was using for the video stream (simplewebrtc) is not on the internet anymore and now I have to go find something else to handle that, so currently, the video part of the video chat is down. I used Okta to handle signalling between users.

Challenges I ran into

Self teaching was the hard part because when you are self teaching, your only pressure and motivation comes from within yourself. I had only dabbled in front end web dev before this project, and I had never used any backend stuff like node.js before. This was also my first time trying to use web APIs. Thus, my experience building Language Transcender consisted of a lot of firsts and a lot of googling. Since I had very little prior knowledge, I also had some dry spells where I felt like I was getting nowhere. I didn't know how far along I was on the project, and I often wondered if I was even making progress. How I overcame this is in the "what i learned" section!

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm really proud that I could combine all of these technologies, that I hadn't even known how to use before the project, into a somewhat working end product. I'm also really proud that I'm trying to create a project that furthers something I'm actually interested in and passionate about, which is connecting the people of the world with technology (and kpop. mostly kpop.).

What I learned

I learned though, that sometimes you just have to take a break from the work. When you come back, it's like your looking at your project with a fresh set of eyes, like a whole other point of view. After I took a few days for a break, I came back and solved problems that I had been chewing on for weeks prior. My mom always told me, "If you are already going down the wrong path, coupled with tiredness, you'll just go even further down the wrong path!" So it's important to take breaks from your work even when you struggle for so long with no success. Also, I learned that if you google hard enough, there will always be an answer to your problem. Technical skills wise, I learned about and how to use:
node.js
- events
- callbacks
- npm, modules
- servers
- token authentication
- jade, express
bootstrap
jquery
how to read documentation for APIs
how to google

What's next for Language Transcender

As aforementioned, the videostream API I was using no longer works :( So when I have time, I'm going to try and find a new API to use for that. Also, I was thinking it'd be cool to add a social media type of functionality to Language Transcender. For example, users could have friend lists so they can quickly communicate with people they often communicate with. Also, celebrities could get special profiles too, so that they could livestream to their fans. It'd just be such a diverse place to hangout. You could listen to your favorite social media influencers from other parts of the world and discover new ones too!

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