Spicy ASL

Inspiration

While we were walking around the RIMAC Arena, we noticed someone who needed a sign language translators. We thought it would be a good idea to build an app to help out people who have rely on those translators to understand what someone is talking about.

What it does

This program translates ASL to static alphabets.

How I built it

We built the front-end on React Native using javascript. We built the back-end using javascript and python while implementing AWS APIs.

Challenges I ran into

WE FACED SO MANY CHALLENGES! Even though integration is one of the more rewarding parts of the SWE life cycle, it is difficult to perform it, especially when all of us are new to the technology we worked on. Mainly AWS was

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Front-end: As the front-end, we are proud of our ability to pick up React Native rather quickly for this hackathon. Having done mobile development using Xcode, this was a huge change - technology, languages, and ecosystem.

What I learned

There is a reason why software engineering classes put so much emphasis on the SWE life cycle. Having requirements, specifications, and designs before jumping right into the code helps a team keep organized and focused on their duties for the project. Our most successful moments were those that were carefully planned and when we were ready for changes.

What's next for Spicy ASL

We would like to finish implementing text-to-speech functionality to our program. Initially, we also wanted to use video for recording gestures instead of images. However, we figured that it would be too complex with our time constraint. If we had more time, we would definitely try to implement that functionality.