Lingualink

Inspiration

The majority of people who start learning a new language give up quickly. A common reason for this is the difficulty of sharing this pursuit with friends and family. Additionally, most people looking to learn a new language are only looking to learn some common phrases that they might come across during their travels. However, the existing solutions on the market don't cater to these unique needs. Language learning is either too rigid and intensive for most people or disorganized and ineffective. We wanted to provide an adaptive, frictionless, and engaging solution to strengthen people's vocabulary skills in different languages.

What it does

Our app gives people the chance to practice vocabulary in different languages in a familiar, yet novel way. Players will be able to compete with friends in challenges or opt for solo practice. Designed with personalization in mind, the app allows users to customize their experience while also making it frictionless to determine what's essential to learn. To ensure both customizability and convenience, we give users with the ability to create their own vocabulary lists while also providing them the ability to quickly auto generate some words to learn for different topics.

How we built it

We used the OpenAI API for the auto-generation feature as well as the "Guess Image" game mode where users need to guess the vocabulary word based on the auto-generated image. Additionally, we used Google's MLKit to provide seamless translation of words when creating and customizing word lists. The multiplayer game mode relies on Apple's Game Center. Finally, to ensure that the user-generated lists are readily accessible across all devices, we store app data on the user's iCloud.

Challenges we ran into

As a team of mostly new iOS developers, we anticipated some learning curve when we began. The integration of some libraries such as Game Center and MLKit presented some challenges along the way due to our unfamiliarity with the libraries and the substantial work needed to reconfigure our project for their inclusion. However, all of us were able to grow substantially over the course of the semester and got to experience a lot of important concepts in Swift development as well as exposure to some interesting frameworks.

What's next for Lingualink

We are happy to have completed all of the initial features we wanted to implement despite the challenges. However, we still have a lot of ideas that can elevate the user experience including features like word pronunciations, the ability share lists and scores with friends, as well as the inclusion of more game modes.