Speech Buddy - Practice Spoken English Free and Unlimited

Inspiration

The core inspiration for making this project came from the face that all english learning platform have very limited free tier. And if you want to learn spoken english seriously then you will have to pay a good sum of money. While those platform are very good and have very informative content, I face problem while practising. As the quote goes, practice makes a man(and women ofc) perfect. The more you practice the better you learn. But the more you practice on paid platform, the more is the cost. Hence let me present Speech Buddy.

What it does

It has a very simple workflow. It gives users a standard english sentence. The user needs to speak it and the app will give them feedback on what were the words that were not pronounced right.

How we built it

We used React and tailwindCSS for building the application and for styling. We used google's WebSpeechAPI for transcription and Github Pages for hosting. Of which, all of them are free.

Challenges we ran into

Initially it was a full stack application with a react frontend and node backend for clear separation of concern. But the backend hosting was incurring cost. Also I used a paid transcription service, AssemblyAI, whose free tier ended very fast as my friends started using the app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The fact that I was able to make it completely free. I ditched the complete backend and made it a frontend only app. I migrated from paid AssemblyAI to free to use WebSpeechAPI provided by google which works perfectly on all chrome browsers and all android devices.