Cognate

What it does

Cognate is a chatbot that lets you have a conversation while learning a foreign language. You can select from 3 languages (French, Spanish, and Chinese), and the bot will have a conversation with you in that language. At any time during the conversation, you can put a word you don't know in {brackets}, and the bot will show you the translation of that word as well as how it fits into the sentence!

How we built it

We used Gupshup, the platform for creating chatbots.

Challenges we ran into

Unfortunately, Gupshup literally would not make GET requests. We have no idea why. We spent 2 hours trying to fix it. We couldn't move on with the development of our project because our API didn't work properly.

What we DO have

Almost nothing, since GET requests don't work, but we have the bot framework ready, we can isolate the words that are marked for translation, we can put them in a translator-ready format, and we can actually translate the sentences (manually).

Built With

• gupshup
• javascript