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This is Speculo
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Landing Page
Inspiration
Effective Communication skill is one of the most important skills in anybody's life, people tend to focus on other areas where they lack growth but tend to ignore that majority of their problem arises from not communicating effectively. I have struggled with stage fright and many other issues related to communication for as long as I can remember and I do not know why did I struggle with it. Was it the eyes of others or the fear of what they might say or how they might judge? I didn't know but one thing was certain that I didn't practice and try hard enough to overcome this shortcoming until one day when everything changed. I met a superb teacher who made every lesson effortless. She told me a secret to grow my communication skill ... Practice!!!. She used to tell me - "Stand in front of a mirror with a anything to read and start reading, emphasize on pronouncing every word energetically, to put extra effort into speaking and a couple other tricks that I won't go into detail about here. So this gave me an idea to build a one of a kind Smart Mirror that helps you grow your communication skills effectively. Why smart mirror? well there are a couple of reasons for it, let's discuss them step by step :
- Looking at yourself in the mirror opens up many emotions, feelings inside of a person while seeing themselves speak.
- There's no other human being intervening so feelings like insecurity, anxiety or fear can be overcome easily
- And while you're looking at the mirror the mirror is looking at you and listening to you so it can provide you a comprehensive report about the way you speak, stand, communicate, confidence etc.
As pointed out by some of our mentors that a web app or a native mobile app may be much better and I do agree with them so we made Speculo in such a way that people can use them as an app too. And as we are talking about building skills there's one more thing that Speculo will help you build and it is Speculo itself that too in a decentralised way by using one of many upcoming and prominent technology "the dojima network".
What it does
There are a couple of tried and tested ways that can help a person improve their communication skills. We have gamified these ways to get you to speak about everything and anything. There is a vocabulary builder mode, a speech practice mode, an impromptu speech mode and games like tongue twisters practice, pronounciation practice and other things. One alpha feature that we have added is you can have a talking session with speculo to simulate talking to a stranger. It uses NLP to first convert speech to text to calculate the word count, pronounciation, filler words and uses volume and pitch measurement to figure out the consistency of voice and fluency.
How we built it
We built it using google's webkits that allow a website to do NLP without any extra headaches. The rest is just simple HTML, CSS, JS.
Challenges we ran into
When trying to implement the web3 version of speculo we ran into a host of issues and due to the time crunch weren't able to deploy it on the blockchain. The blockchain will be used to hold the individual user's progress reports and the for transaction purposes. A big challenge is the acceptance of web3, people do not know about it and in general people are reluctant to change. But making such a simple product decentralised shows the value of the technology in the future and the ease of access. No more talking to puny humans for growing where necessary. Now you can do that from the power of your own hand. Speculo is aimed at educational institutions so the future generation can better get accustomed to the digital reality that we're all living in right now and trust that web3 is here to stay and it's benefits.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We made a functional website that can be used to get a basic understanding of your speaking skills, it can transcribe your speech or your tv shows if you want, It can tell you the words per minute you spoke, the filler words you used and the top strong words you said. Seeing it work is really motivating us to add more things to it.
What we learned
How simple things can have big Impacts.
What's next for Speculo
Well there's a lot that is waiting for speculo in the future, it's just a small part of the big picture. We'll be adding mode for content creators, there are some other blockchain related products that will accompany speculo.
