Lingua

Inspiration

Raghav: This project connects back to a personal experience of one of my friends. She’s part of an art studio that collaborated with a school in Korea to create an art collage that related to their daily school lives. I remember hearing about her complaints to me about her issues with communications as she didn’t speak perfect Korean, forcing her to often use resources like Google Translate to individually translate messages sent from Korea. While thinking of this project I thought about how much this could’ve helped her if she had access to a resource like this.

Julia: This project would also help many adults working in international businesses all over the world. Language barriers are a universal problem; they affect every industry, especially ones where employees are frequently working with others who live far away, which is becoming more and more common. Lingua is a simple way to fill that gap.

What it does

Our project is called Lingua, meaning “language” in Latin, and it is a messaging site that translates all messages in a chat into each user’s preferred language. It can use both text-to-speech and speech-to-text, and can run while another window is being used in a setting called “background mode”. It is easily accessible to phones, tablets, and computers and does not require creating an account.

How we built it

After planning out our idea for Lingua, we used Base44 (and briefly ChatGPT) to help us build the final project. We chose to use Base44 because our team is relatively inexperienced with the full range of programming knowledge needed to build an entire site or application, and AI support allowed us to build the platform we envisioned with the time and skillsets we had.

Challenges we ran into

One main challenge we ran into while working on this project was the User Interface. Due to our lack of experience with UI, we had to search for resources that we could use to develop it. Looking for a solution to this problem took out a good chunk of our time as we had to experiment with different softwares that could aid us in this, and we finally settled on Base44 because of its simple interface and easy way to test code. We also had trouble programming a feature called Background Mode in time (It’s described in detail under What’s Next).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of the fact that we were able to plan and execute an idea that would aid such a diverse field of people despite our lack of experience. Today, we went from having a problem many of us deal with in our everyday lives to an, albeit simple, solution for that problem, and we’re incredibly proud that we were able to build something fully functional that other people could actually use in such a short time frame.

What we learned

As a team we learned the importance of collaboration and clear communication, paralleling what we’re working to create for others through Lingua. Even when we speak the same language, we were having some trouble planning everything out clearly and explaining it well in the beginning, but we got much better at that throughout the project. Our key takeaway from the development of Lingua was learning about the importance of clear communication in a workspace field.

What's next for Lingua

Next, we want to focus on fully implementing Background Mode, a function where someone has another window in fullscreen and is communicating with Lingua only through audio to both send and receive messages. We got close to it today, but we didn’t quite have enough time to debug it and get it to be fully functional not only in English but in other languages as well. Background mode would add a whole new layer to Lingua’s functionality, and we would’ve loved to show it to you if we’d had more time.

We also want to make it an application as well as a web browser so people can drag the window around outside of the tab and have it as an overlay while they work on other applications. This would also greatly increase Lingua’s functionality, but it wasn’t possible to complete it with the tools we were using in our time today.

Built With

• base44
• chatgpt
• html
• javascript
• json
• jsx
• textscript
• ts