Inspiration
Inspiring children to learn to read and provide a nurturing experience for those less fortunate. We wanted to create a simple app that would motivate children to actively engage in reading and connect with them. Unfortunately children do not always have the opportunity to have someone to read to them. Our application would allow children to enjoy picture books on their own, fostering a passion for storytelling.
What it does
DubReader allows a user to experience a digital picture book with audio narration. Users are given a simple UI that displays a clickable image carousel containing a children's book. Clicking the presented book page narrates the text.
How we built it
We built DubReader with a node.js backend, supported with express.js and a react frontend, supported with bootstrap. We used Google's Vision and Text-To-Speech API's, which were integral in producing audio files pulled from text in images. Packages were managed with npm and we used Github as our means of source control. We wrote all of our actual code in Visual Studio Code.
Challenges we ran into
Our front-end developers had never used react to create a GUI. They faced challenges when incorporating different libraries and having them synergize. On the back-end, we had trouble creating routes that would work correctly when accessed from our react front-end. We had to generate static data for our audio because of this.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
This was the first time for most of us using API's and react, so a large part of the challenge in this project was learning how to use both of these to realize our vision.
What we learned
We now have powerful Google Cloud tools available to us. Incorporating these APIs into future projects will be more simple now that we are familiar with the initial setup. React is a powerful tool for developing web applications and we are excited about using this for later projects. Many of us have not created a javascript based application before and this project has opened our eyes to the potential of developing web-based tools.
What's next for DubReader
We would like to include the Google Translation API to make our application even more accessible. Including this feature would also encourage all users to learn new languages through a fun narrative.
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