Inspiration
In India, good schools and teachers are far-flung, and students from villages often end up in a bus for many hours in a day, only to receive substandard education. Being students ourselves, we realize the need for quality education for all. That, coupled with a drive to always help people, led us to the idea of bringing education to anyone with just a basic phone.
What it does
Our product is a bot that teaches over a basic telephone. Teachers and professors can add lessons to subjects that they wish to teach. These lessons are delivered by simple, menu-driven phone calls that the student makes, and the student's progress for each subject is saved. Our bot also encourages the student to ask questions and be interactive. Any query the student has will promptly be answered by our bot. All communication is done in Hindi.
How we built it
We used Exotel services to enable students to interact with our back-end via a basic phone. The back-end itself was built with Node.js and Express.js, and used Google Cloud for voice-to-text and text-to-voice, as well as for Hindi to English and English to Hindi translation. We used Wolfram Alpha APIs to answer students' queries.
Challenges we ran into
Despite the Exotel documentation being unclear, we worked with the Exotel engineers present on-site to understand and implement the APIs we needed.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
This product is something that has profound societal benefits, and we're proud of making something that can impact generations of Indians positively.
What's next for Voice Tutor
We would like to have provisions for multiple languages, so that anyone, from anywhere in the world, can use our product. We would like to provide something as close to a good, interactive teacher as possible, and we still have a long way to go in that regard. Making lessons fully interactive, adding provisions for assessment and making our bot fully voice-powered are some of the things that we would like to implement.
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