Debatably

Inspiration

We created Debatably because everyone deserves a voice in global conversations. While 1.5 billion people speak English, 6.5 billion don't - and their perspectives matter. In education, this language barrier means students and people across the world miss out on learning from diverse viewpoints. By breaking down these barriers, we're aiming to not only translate words, but also create a global classroom where people can learn from each other's experiences and cultures.

What it does

Debatably is a real-time debate platform that enables multilingual discussions through AI-powered speech recognition, translation, and processing. Users from around the world join debate rooms (while speaking in their native language) and have their speech automatically translated for the other participant in the call.

How we built it

We built Debatably using MERN tech stack with additions:

Next.js 15 with Turbopack for the frontend. Express.js backend with MongoDB for data storage. Google Cloud Translate and Gemini API. Hugging Face. Agora live-video streaming. MongoDB for storing user information, call history, and more. React. Express. Teamwork.

Challenges we ran into

Implementing real-time speech recognition across different browsers. Coding and setting up live video calling. Familiarizing ourselves with Gemini's setup and implementation. Managing multiple language translations simultaneously. Many, many more...

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Creating a seamless multilingual debate experience. Implementing real-time speech-to-text transcriptions. Coding and setting up live video streaming. UI and features.