Accenterate

Inspiration

Our team was inspired by the issues pertaining to anybody who faces issues that revolve around accents. There was a Facebook post from a vendor in a foreign country that had a sign that essentially said to learn their language instead of criticizing their English, and we wanted to help people adapt their accents in order to match a culture's norm for pronunciation of English words.

What it does

Our hack essentially converts speech to text using Google Cloud's speech to text API. It attempts to adapt the user's accent to a cultural norm accent that is commonly used.

How we built it

We used firebase to host our website. We used the Google API for account management and voice recognition.

Challenges we ran into

We ran to many challenges throughout developing this hack. The Firebase hosting took far longer than it really should take to accomplish, and that drained a lot of valuable time. We also had weak backend developers for the majority of the hackathon until around half way, and even then, one of our members had to go home. In addition, Connecting the backend to our frontend proved to be a problem for us too, as we had both sets of code ready but weren't able to connect and relate them in the best way. Figuring out how to change various parts of a premade template also proved to be more challenging than one would think, and in combination, all of these things that didn't go as planned can be attributed to these challenges we ran to. Although we did run into challenges, we also overcame many of them as well.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

Setting up the Firebase with its database and hosting was a huge accomplishment, as it was one of the huge drainers of our limited time. Many of the Devs from Google weren't able to identify the bug, and after repeatedly attempting to fix it, a solution to it arose. In addition, configuring our website and linking the back and front end is also an accomplishment my team and I are proud of. We were able to push out a final project that was extremely representative of what we envisioned to be our MVP project.

What we learned

We all learned a lot through this hackathon. Time management, communication, teamwork, collaboration, and many other things are areas we all improved in as a result of learning from this hack/project. In addition, we learned how to set up and host our Firebase stuff as well as use the Google Cloud API. We learned a lot of implementing this stuff together into our webapp; HTML and CSS basics were refreshed and reviewed in order to complete some meals too. We learned that time management is extremely important, and that having a more solid projection/plan would help us more with a future hackathon idea.

What's next for Accenterate

A much more published and pristine user interface and user experience would be a next step for us. One of the bigger next steps for us will be better utilizing the Google Cloud Voice APIs better in conjunction with the sample people we use for the talking.