Scarlet's Thread

Inspiration

The rise of remote jobs allows companies to hire people from all around the world. However, many foreigners cannot communicate properly with people from other countries, making virtual collaboration and communication more difficult and even decreasing efficiency. According to FluentCap, 54% of employees face language barriers at work, and distributed teams lose up to 25% of their productivity due to miscommunication.

What it does

We built Scarlet's Thread, a project powered by the Gemini API for real-time translation during calls. Our AI assistant, Scarlet, allows users to communicate with people from other countries without needing to learn the speaker’s language by displaying subtitles on the screen. It is designed for people who are beginners in the language or those who have the potential in their speech but not the knowledge in all languages. When initiated, it translates speech from English to Spanish in real time.

How we built it

The project is built using the Gemini API and developed in VS Code. We used HTML to create the interface and integrated real-time audio processing and subtitle generation for seamless communication.

There were many challenges including:

We had only 1 laptop that had "VS Code" because we were using restricted school laptops.
This also stopped us from using Chrome extensions for the project, and we were forced to make it into a website.
Having only 1 laptop limited our work rate by a lot, letting the code be done 4 times slower than we would like.
Apart from this, we also had issues with getting the API and GitHub because of school restrictions on our laptops.

Accomplishments that we're proud of:

Even though our workforce was cut in half, twice, we were still able to deliver a working app, which is, we would say, our biggest accomplishment of this project.

What We Learned

During the development of this project, we learned about APIs and how to use them, as well as more in-depth knowledge of how to program and make real working apps.

What's next for Scarlet's Thread

For future improvements, we want to make Scarlet capable of translating more languages. We also plan to support translations from other applications on your computer, such as Zoom, WhatsApp, Discord, Teams, and others. Additionally, we want to expand the project beyond computers and make it available on smartphones as well.