Live Universal Translator

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  Flow Diagram of project structure

Inspiration

I am planning on travelling in a few years time and worry about my incompetence in other languages. I have a chronic illness and being able to express what my issues are, to a medical professional or aiding members of the public, in any language is of great importance to me.

What it does

It converts detected speech into text, and the language of this text is then identified. Users will have an opportunity to choose which language they want to translate their speech into (they only have to do this once per launch of the code). If the language detected isn't English, the speech is automatically translated into English (for English users, like myself). This text is then translated into the target language, and outputted visually and audibly.

How we built it

I built this using Python, breaking the project down into multiple stages: Speech Detection, Speech to text, etc. I made use of the packages: PyGame (to create a UI to visually display the translation), speech_recognition (to detect speech and convert into text), pyttsx3 (to convert text into speech), googletrans (to translate the text between languages) and langdetect (to detect the language of the text).

Challenges we ran into

This was not my original project. My computer crashed an hour into arrival, bugging out my VSCode files. Despite maintenance and repetitive installing and uninstalling, it could not be salvaged or fixed. I now only had the option for a Python project and had lost time. The only other issue I encountered was the awful pronunciation of translated text - hence why I added a visual component to the final output.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Coming up with, planning and developing this project alone whilst already a little dejected after my initial failure. I am really proud of this product and wish to develop it further in the future.

What we learned

How to concisely combine multiple components of a larger program.

What's next for Live Universal Translator

Allow permanent settings (i.e. setting up a database), creating a much better UI and launching it.

Built With

• python
• thonny