Poly | Devpost

Launch Screen
Main Page
Chat Screen

Inspiration

As people who have learned multiple languages before, we discovered that speaking and interacting with an actual person, rather than just reading or writing, is the most effective and fastest way to truly learn another language. We decided there needs to be a platform where language learners from all over the world can utilize their freshly earned knowledge or skills in a live setting. Thus, we built Poly, where our users can live chat with others, to maximize their potential into reaching their goals of becoming a polyglot.

What it does

Poly will pair you up with someone, and you can chat with them in the language you have been learning! Poly mimics a regular day-to-day conversation by throwing a random topic for you and the other person to talk about. It can be travel, foods, school, sports, and so on. If both users are willing to use their voice instead of typing, they can do that as well! Now, if you want to take up more of a tutor role, then you can pick the language you are already fluent in, and Poly will match you with a student. If you are trying to learn a new language, Poly will get you either a tutor or someone who has been learning the same language as you! We hope to create a virtual environment where thousands of users can just open our app and casually talk with people across the globe! Learning will be so much more accessible and fun!

How we built it

We built our mobile app using Xcode and Swift. A lot of the UI elements, such as buttons and forms, were already built in Xcode. For the live chat functionality, we are planning to use Firebase for backend, where all the user and message data is stored. For frontend, there is a Swift template called Chat iPhone App Template where it can be integrated with Firebase.

Challenges we ran into

The team had no previous experience with or hadn't used Xcode and Swift in a long time. A lot of time was spent researching into what kind of tools can be used to realize our ideas as well.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of our UI/UX design; it is easy to use and has a clean layout! Also, frankly we are really proud of our project idea as well. It is super relatable to us and millions of people around the world. We want to make learning fun for everyone!

What we learned

During this project we learned that setting realistic MVPs is very important. We were too ambitious perhaps, but we are still really proud of the work we accomplished.