Letterriffic

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  The bot in use

Inspiration

Our aim with Letterrific is to allow Discord to become more accessible for those in the Deaf community. Over 5% of the world population suffer from disabling hearing loss and Deafness is the third most common disability. Despite this there are very few solutions for Deaf people who use Discord with regards to voice chats and calls, leaving them confused and left out of conversations

What it does

Letterrific is a Discord bot and website used to create transcripts of calls in real-time It will allow Deaf users to participate in voice calls in a more meaningful way and make Discord a more inclusive platform. It uses AssemblyAI speech recognition to translate spoken word in Voice Calls to text.

How it works

The discord bot is built using discord.js. Once connected to a voice channel it sends an audio stream to the AssemblyAI endpoint for voice recognision. Once AssemblyAI has sent a final transcript the bot sends the result in the text chat. Our website also provides a demo of AssemblyAI's voice recognision.

Challenges we ran into

None of us had created a Discord bot before so we found it challenging to learn how to set it up. It was also very difficult to figure out how to send the audio from the bot to AssemblyAI.

What we learned

We learned how to develop a Discord bot using JavaScript, how to use AssemblyAI and about the difficulties Deaf people face with socialising and working online.

What's next for Letterriffic

We hope to be able to develop it further so it will be able to tackle voice calls with more people to allow Deaf people to participate fully in larger Discord servers. We also hope to add a feature to change text from the channel to speech in the voice channel to help include mute people.

Built With

• assemblyai
• css
• discord
• html
• javascript