Wordy (From table 22)

Inspiration

As international students in college, we are faced with the extra stress of understanding all the complex words in the numerous weekly readings that we are assigned. While reading, googling definitions gets repetitive, and sometimes you just forget the meaning right after skimming the definition. We wanted to solve this problem through our passion for building, so that's what we did....but also added a few additional functionalities, because of the time we had.

What it does

It serves as a personalized dictionary that is meant to cross language barriers- make readings and travels more efficient and make conversing with someone who doesn't speak a common language possible. You come across a word you don't understand? Open our app, tap on the word, and it defines it for you right then. Save it to your personalized dictionary so you can go back to it to learn. Travelling in a country where all the sign boards are in a language you don't understand? Use our app. Tap the word and it converts it to a language that you understand. Want to talk to someone who doesn't speak your language? Record their voice, and it will translate the recording right then to a language you understand...as easy as sending a message, but without the burden of conversion- made possible by Wordy.

How we built it

We used google vision api to recognize the text blocks from camera activity, and adjusted the pixel values ourselves to accurately extract the tapped word, Oxford APIs to extract the word definitions, IBM watson translation APIs to translate languages, and microsoft azure cognitive services for speech to text translations. Plenty of other work for our part too.

Challenges we ran into

Accurately extracting the word was a big challenge, since we had to come up with our own efficient algorithms. FRONT-END was a huge pain, and collaborating in android isn't the most convenient.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Smooth integration of all the different components, and a completely functional app that can potentially benefit a lot of people. There is also a lot to look forward to for this app.

What we learned

All of us were relatively new to Android. Definitely learned a lot about the development environment.

What's next for Wordy

Instant language translations in the camera, so that you can travel to any country, just point your camera and you will get subtitles right there. Integration of Machine Learning and flash cards for your personalized dictionary. Additional languages for translation.