Tibetan Overflow

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Inspiration

As a Tibetan/Himalayan who grew up in the West, there are not many digital resources easily accessible for Tibetan Youth to learn Tibetan in engaging ways and open source forums to ask questions. Stack Overflow and Reddit provide us with inspiration to create an open-source forum.

What it does

This app provides two main services. The first one is it regularly publishes 'word of the day' and 'phrase of the day' to keep it engaging for Tibetan and language learners to study Tibetan. Secondly, it provides an open-source forum for questions that are upvoted to receive attention from contributors and answers to questions that are upvoted so that the users see the best possible answers.

How we built it

Using Figma, we prototyped and envisioned the MVP, and planned what technical solutions we would implement. For example, we want to use ReactJS to build the site and have SQL or Cloud DB and Blob storage solutions to store the data and use ChatGPT API / Microsoft Translate API / Monlam AI (Potentially) to build the site and host it in a scalable solution such as in AWS, Azure.

Challenges we ran into

The primary challenges were time constraints which otherwise could have enabled us to code the UI. Since we were constantly improving the UI/UX prototype, it felt it was necessary to achieve a solid product idea before jumping into development.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to build a strong foundation with the idea of the product and a prototype which helped us with development.

What we learned

Identifying and researching the lack of digital solutions for Tibetan people is significant. Growing up, it was frustrating to see a lack of apps designed for Tibetan/Himalayan users. With the advent of AI and NLP, it is possible for us to accelerate the Tibetan developers community to develop apps/websites.