Inspiration

A friendly voice who helps you start and finish projects. Inspired by a failed IKEA installation.

What it does

Talks you through the steps of building or making something. While your hands are busy you can talk to the app and it responds with audible feedback and instructions.

How I built it

With nodejs, webkit speech synthesizer, webkit speech recognition and api ai. As we converse with the user, the synthesizer speaks for the app. When the user responds, speech recognition translates the user's voice into text and sends it to Api.ai to determine the user's intent.

Challenges I ran into

The speech apis were challenging. We are an international team and the app doesn't always recognize our accents. It's hard to know what to focus on when building the project.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The app recognizes speech and responds appropriately. It's customizable with a simple JSON input file. We can make any DIY instruction we want.

What's next for Simple DIY

Engineering-wise - make it faster and smarter. Build a better UI. Build a user-friendly interface to create instructions.

Product-wise - Think about the possibilities. Imagine cooking with it. Walking a class through a science experiment. Learning origami. What can't it do? Maybe we add on a human layer where you talk to an expert if the app confuses you.

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