SpeakNotes

SpeakNotes is a modern note-taking app that assists students to make and share audible notes. Its smart interface support features like inter-language text conversion and text-to-speech conversion.

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Inspiration

The language barrier is one of the biggest challenges in the education system today. As per estimates from Pew Research Center, almost 47% of immigrants do not speak English proficiently and more than 350 different languages are spoken in the United States. To solve this problem of the language barrier and learn new information in a more accessible way, we created SpeakNotes which not only speaks all your notes in several different languages but changes the text into your preferred language.

What it does

Speak notes help students all across the globe to learn new things more conveniently. It is a powerful note-taking app that lets you listen to your notes like an audiobook and even change its language. Students can also share their notes with other users for knowledge sharing and collective learning.

How we built it

We used ReactJs as the frontend framework to create an application and utilized Flask Rest APIs as the backend server. All user creation, notes management, text-to-speech, and note sharing features are accomplished using these API CRUD operations. Google cloud's text-to-speech API is used for converting the note text to speech, along with Google cloud's translate API for text language conversion. A CockroachDB(PostgreSQL) database was deployed on AWS to store the data, which was accessed from Python backend using psycopg2 package.

Challenges we ran into

The most challenging tasks we encountered were:

  • API integration: We used many flask and Google Cloud APIs. Integrating them with Front end was challenging and a great learning experience.
  • Setting GCloud and CockroachDB environment: Both our DB server and Google APIs needed cloud account creation, local environment setup along with API keys and auth. Configuring and Developing it took some time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of:

  • With Speak Notes app, people with disabilities can get aid by using the text-to-speech feature.
  • Students all across the globe can use the app by using the language change feature for the notes.
  • Students can now share their notes which will promote learning.
  • We learned new Technologies such as Google cloud APIs, Flask etc.
  • Once hosted, this app is online and can be accessed with any device(iPad, iPhone, Android, Web browser) which makes it user-friendly.

Runtime Instructions

Note

The app requires environment setup for accessing Google Cloud APIs and CockroachDB. Setup below parameters in your .env file at project root folder:

  • DATABASE_URL ="cockroach db database URL"
  • GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS ="Local path to downloaded credentials file with access to project on Google Cloud"

Python instructions

  • pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Installs all python packages used in project

  • python3 app.py

Runs all flask Apis locally.

Node instructions

  • npm install

Installs all the dependencies on the local machine.

  • npm start

Runs the app in the development mode.

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