Inspiration
On a bus last week, there was a lady who was struggling to communicate with the bus driver. She got lucky and someone who knew sign language was able to stand in and translate for both parties. From then, we were determined to end this communication barrier. In the world of technology, we all have phones and this app uses your phone to expand one's abilities by creating new ways of communicating. Yes, we can all communicate by texting but that takes away the face to face communication. This app is one of a kind since there are no prior apps that have been able to translate spoken words into ASL and ease communication among everyone. We truly hope this app can ease everyday interactions for the ones’ whose abilities are different than ours.
What it does
As a user, you are able to speak into the phone and the app will translate the spoken words into the American Sign Language and plays a video.
How we built it
We built this by scrapping the web and finding videos for different words. Then using Android Studio, we were able to create a user-friendly app that is quick but also visually pleasing.
Challenges we ran into
Not being fully knowledgable about the ASL language created some difficulties when it came to verbs such as 'is' or 'are'. It was also difficult to know how the plural of a certain word is shown in ASL. Another challenge was to scrap the web and find the videos in a time effective way. There were many links on each page and we had to create an algorithm that sped up this process and saved the correct links. Having no prior knowledge of web scrapers, made this task even more difficult but we are proud that we were able to scrap the webpage in a great time.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We wrote a script that found the singular form of each word and using the base word, it found the ASL version. Our biggest accomplishment is that we have created this tool called pipe that connects people who may have otherwise struggled to communicate.
What we learned
We learned quite a bit about the ASL language itself, webpage scrapping, and how to create animations with words on the app. It was an amazing experience that has taught us a lot and we are extremely thankful for all the organizers.
What's next for Pipe
Pipe will have two main goals in mind, moving forward. First, we would like to expand the dictionary of the words, we have and make it more pleasing to the user by converting the videos into animations using our animation engine. Secondly using AI technology, to also be able to translate the ASL to spoken words in order to facilitate both way communication.
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