PolyBot

Inspiration

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has thrown up problems for students who find it difficult to learn independently, especially learning a new language that requires social interaction and instant feedback. We decided to make a Discord bot that aids students in their virtual language learning journey.

What it does

PolyBot has commands that can be utilized by all members of the channels. The commands are used by the ! prefix.

tr_text <language> <”text”> translates text into targeted language by text
tr_audio <language> <”text”> translates text into targeted language by audio
tr_daily asks you the quiz of the day
tr_setdaily allows you to create your own quiz by following the prompts
tr_leaderboard displays the rank of members based on the channel points for dailies
help get all the commands

How we built it

For our Discord Bot, we used Discord.py library and Python. We also integrated two Google Clouds API as it helps with our features. The Google Translate API allows users to translate words in 100+ languages just with a simple command. We also used Google Text-to-Speech API in order to have words translated and returned by with an audio.

In terms of our website, we used HTML, CSS, and javascript in order to display all the information. We also built it with the Qoom platform.

Challenges we ran into

Since more than half of our teammates have never built a Discord bot before, it was a challenge learning how to build it from scratch. Our team also has never worked with Google APIs so it was very challenging to understand how to integrate the APIs into our Discord bot.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Overall however, we are very proud that we made a working Discord bot that has features to help students in their virtual learning journey. We made this bot because we as students also find it very difficult to learn a new language in an e-learning environment. Therefore, we felt accomplished that the features PolyBot has, is helpful to those learning a new language.

What we learned

We learned how to integrate Google Translate API and Google Text-to-Speech API into our Discord bot, which was the most challenging aspect of this hackathon. We are very happy with this as we hope that our bot can help those apart of the language learning community in Discord.

What's next for PolyBot

What we have next in store for PolyBot is to add new features. One of the top features we want to add is a match-making system where a member can get matched with their exchange language partner. We felt like this is very beneficial to encourage a more in-person social interaction when learning new languages.