Mother's Tongue

Building The Bridge Between Languages @ Naijahacks2018 Hackathon Team UnifyConcept #TeamUnifyconcept #NaijaHacks2018

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Inspiration

Alt text Growing up as child with little or no experience with computer and also finding yourself in a polytechnic where tech guys rule and those who have no knowledge or bad at programming are not really valued. My name is Olabode Oyinkansola Abdul Qudus i started programming with paper and pen using red pen to mark my error, black for keywords and blue for the other part. I finally got a system during my second semester as a first year student of the institution and took it has a task to help other student who have no system by helping them with practicals and assignment although this later turn to business and a team named UnifyConcept emerge to help making innovation simple with little or no cost. My team and i really think we can make a difference but no opportunity showed up nor sponsorship until now when we have an avenue to do what we do best.

I came across a link telling me about NaijaHacks on a dev whatsapp group so i informed my guys about it of which we plan on working on a project called Steganography but we asked ourselves questions how does Steganography affect or solve a problem in Nigeria? of which the answers we have are not genuine enough. A team mate who happens to be a much more concentrated Yoruba boy more than i do by the name Akinwunmi Oladele said what if we teach people our language and let them see the beauty of our culture through our language.

The problem of language teaching and language use is a global one. Several studies have been carried out and several attempts have been made by individuals, government agents and other stakes holders in the education sector with several policies formulated, all in an effort to address the problems militating against effective language teaching and language use in our schools, with the aim of bringing an improvement to the much important phenomenon of which none as being done until now.

What it does

Alt text To point out a problem is important but solving the problem is much more important. The application and website teaches the fundamental of the major regional language in Nigeria. We plan to use three major regional language as a case study by teaching the fundamentals of this languages which include the letters, numbers 1-100, phrases, frequently used words, vocabularies e.t.c. which will make every individual making use of this application or visit the website learn the basics of the regional language of his or her choice within limited time. A text to speech application that converts text to speech upon a button click is also included to makes learning fun although the conversion is currently to English language which happen to be the official language generally adopted in Nigeria

How we built it

Alt text A Domain was given to us by our facilitator of which my team mate and i utilize the opportunity fully by building a website that perform 80% of the features needed and an android application that performances 80% which together perform 100%. i.e. the application is dependent on the website and some features of the website only run on the mobile app to optimize both platform fully. Which makes it easy to reduce the barrier between languages in Nigeria to the barest minimum if not fully eradicate.

Challenges we ran into

Alt text The first challenge we ran into was the time frame, we are lucky enough to complete our registration before it closes but the time frame took it cause on us which made us work overtime.

Secondly, materials gathering its not as easy as we thought. We searched for materials from numerous journals and surf the web for information.

Thirdly, only the API provided by the organizers are to be used of which we don't have language translator API. More so, the available API's are not free. But all effort were made to make the current app and website good enough to

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Alt text

  1. We were able to come up with a dope project within a week
  2. Text to speech application in android (This can be a stand alone project on it own)
  3. Passing knowledge to numerous individual via our work
  4. Thinking out of the other sections most people tend to think of

What we learned

  1. We learnt how to work with and against time
  2. How to integrate android with webpages
  3. How to divide the task and multiply the success

What's next for Mother's Tongue

We plan to introduce many languages because every language happens to be native to certain individual or community for instance Hindi to Indians, Mandarin To Chinese and numerous languages. Even Nigeria has over 512 regional languages meaning this project can still be extended beyond human expectations.

Secondly, certification can be included just like we sit for CCNA, Android and other certification courses people will be able to sit for a language exam.

Thirdly, a speech recognition that automatically detect the language spoken and convert it to the desired output. Other package will be confidential for now.

Team UnifyConcept

NaijaHacks2018

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