Nagish

Phone calls for the hearing and speech impaired

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Inspiration

Being a team of veterans, we unfortunately know people who lost their hearing ability either partially or in full during their military service. We wanted to help our fellow veterans and anyone else that is hearing or speech impaired, by bringing an everyday technology that most people take for granted and make it accessible to people with disabilities who could never use it before. "Nagish" stands for "Accessible" in Hebrew. This is our inspiration.

What it does

Nagish is just as simple as placing a regular phone call. We connect people together by allowing the side who needs it to talk and "hear" using a textual messenger window instead of an actual phone. Our technology converts text to speech and speech to text in real time so both sides could converse. - Without limitations!

How we built it

  • Web interface and signup form (HTML/CSS) - AVAILABLE on the domain nagish.ml.
  • DigitalOcean for hosting the website, our ubuntu virtual machine, and database.
  • flask to run a local server and receive the data from the website
  • A python program to interact with the Twilio API. Using Twilio's phone services and Google speech to text API
  • A python program to interact with the Google-Cloud API to translate text to speech
  • A facebook bot built with python and flask to interact with our backend and work as a feeder to the front-end and the users

We provide each of our new customers with a Twilio-generated phone number so they can make, and receive calls as text from/to Facebook messenger. - Reading what is being said on the other side, and writing back knowing that the other side will hear it as voice.

Challenges we ran into

Integrating between many different API's and creating custom functions to make the different platforms "talk" to each other. Minimizing the propagation delays as much as possible to allow a constant flow of text-to-speech and speech-to-text so that both sides will be able to talk without waiting for response

Accomplishments that we're proud of

In less than 24 hours, we were able to create everything from front-end to back-end and were even able to make optimizations.

What we learned

None of our teammates had previous experience with any of the API's that we worked with. Still, we were able to learn how to integrate all the different interfaces

What's next for Nagish

We truly believe that Nagish will be helpful for a lot of people around the world. Not only for hearing and speech impaired but also to everyone who might need to take a call during a meeting or a class. It brings sound without hearing and allows talking without speaking. We are looking forward to keep developing our platform and make it available to and accessible (nagish) to everyone

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