Voice Base

VoiceBase

Inspiration

Domain Name: voicebase.tech

We were inspired by the fact that there are over 466 million people in the world with disabling hearing loss and globally the number of people of all ages visually impaired is estimated to be over 285 million. (WHO, 2018 & 2010, respectively) Yet, despite this pandemic creating numerous additional barriers for people with disabilities, there have not been many accessible, convenient, or affordable solutions.

Most people who are deaf and hearing-impaired depend on the ability to read lips to converse with others, and a facial covering that impedes communication can increase frustration and affect their mental health. When the volume of speech is reduced, the listener must concentrate harder to understand and follow the communication. Couple this reduction in volume with the inability to lip-read, and it can make it very frustrating for hard-of-hearing and deaf individuals, as well as the general population.

What it does

Voicebase helps people by transcribing speech into text on their screen in real-time.

How we built it

HTML, CSS, Javascript, Twilio API, Google Cloud Speech to Text API

Challenges we ran into

Team Members with low bandwidth unable to communicate at times, time zone differences.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Learning more about how to use Twilio API's for the first time, Google Cloud, and also read documentation from other API's we were considering like Assembly AI.