Vox

Inspiration

When brainstorming project ideas, we mainly focused on solutions that could improve our daily lives. Most of our hardest struggles as high schoolers include social interactions, which requires concise language in order to convey our ideas during presentations and projects. Communication is also sometimes hard in large family settings, since many of our relatives are not familiar with English. In fact, about twenty percent of Americans speak English as their second language.

What it does

Vox helps individuals who lack confidence in spoken English. Users pre-record a speech, sentence, paragraph, or phrase, and upload it onto the site. The user then receives feedback on general aspects of their piece. Vox is especially useful for those who are new to English, or for individuals who would like to strengthen their speaking skills. Our solution aids users in gaining confidence in their speaking abilities, so they can continue building on their current speaking skills.

How we built it

We used repl.it to create it using Next.js and Tailwind. It was our first time using both Next.js, APIs, and Tailwind, so we ran into a few issues, but persisted and overcame them. We also used AssemblyAI’s Speech-to-Text API and OneAI.

Challenges we ran into

As this was our first time seeing APIs and using Next.js and Tailwind, it was difficult to implement all the parts of the program quickly. Our program would have bugs that we didn’t understand, leading to a lot of trial and error to overcome our problems. In our frontend layout, setting up the Tailwind CSS was not working at all, so we spent a considerable amount of time attempting to understand. Parsing through the JSON files and then interpreting them correctly for the ONEAI API was difficult, as was outputting the correct result.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to understand and use code that was new to us. We are especially satisfied with being able to learn so much and apply it in such a short amount of time.

What we learned

Through this project, we learned how to use APIs, Tailwind, and Next.js. The process of learning to use these tools was difficult, but it taught us how to be patient with the issues in order to fix them. Having these skills available is incredibly helpful as they are used for a great number of things; companies and businesses use these techniques as well. We learned a lot of new concepts and understood the relationship between frontend and backend better.

What's next for Vox

In the future, Vox can have a highlight feature to point out errors that need to be fixed, making it easier for users to see errors. We hope to add on some animations and a few color schemes and fonts, allowing the layout to be easy on the eyes no matter who is viewing Vox. We also plan to expand our program to a wider range of languages, so it is more flexible.

Built With

• assemblyaiapi
• next.js
• oneai
• replit
• tailwind