[21] - picLearning

Selecting source and target language
Using flashcards to learn about already added pictures with translations (in this case, Spanish and French)
The app recognizing a picture of a waterfall, and translating it to French.

Inspiration

We have traveled a lot around the world, and sometimes we have no way of knowing what objects around us are called in the country we are in's language, so this app attempts to solve that problem.

What it does

picLearning uses object recognition to get the name of a real-world object, and then translates it to your language of choice. Afterwards, picLearning will store flashcards of all objects you've added which can help you to practice and learn more about the language.

How we built it

It is built for iOS using Objective-C, Google Cloud API for object recognition, Google Translate API for translation and Firebase for storing object information in a database.

Challenges we ran into

At first, implementing Google Cloud API for object recognition was tough, since the API returns a lot of possibilities, and we had trouble figuring out which was the most accurate one. Also, we came across a lot of Firebase errors that took us a while to figure out, since we were using Git and that seemed to be the main problem.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We made an app that can encourage people to learn new languages in a different and creative way, that can also help them in their travels even if they're not fully interested in learning the language itself.

What we learned

We learned how to use the necessary APIs to recognize objects via a picture, and to translate text from any language to any language.

What's next for picLearning

We plan on making it have more social interaction between users, that is, allow users to share their top languages, their objects that they have taken pictures of, and even create study groups to learn a language together.