Inspiration
Friends is a popular show that taught the world to speak English. As a native English speaker, I also watch shows and dramas from different countries to help me learn their language, but I tend to remember phrases that aren’t as useful to me because I enjoy watching romantic comedies. So what if I wanted to build vocabulary and knowledge of something a little more academic like the biographies of amazing people?
What it does
That’s why I created Language Learner, which allows me to read text in my native language while listening to how it would have been said in my language of interest. Rather than looking for you tube videos of such academic topics with subtitles to watch, it’s easier to find academic topics in text form.
Language learner can then be used to ingest the text in one’s native language and then output audio in the language of interest.
How we built it
Using S 3 to host a static website so that I don't need to maintain or patch any servers, I have a serverless A-W-S Lambda function that uses Polly to generate the audio files for each article. These files are stored in a separate S3 bucket that's accessed by the website to serve the audio to website perusers. In this way, the frontend and backend are separatedin a way that's maintainable and scalable.
I built the website using static site generator Hugo, which I used for the first time as well. I also managed the development process from source code to runtime with Circle C-I and A-W-S such that when I add an article, an audio file will eventually be created.
Challenges we ran into
CI/CL was difficult, as this was the first time I've implemented it and ran into a lot of nuances when trying to deploy it.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Using Hugo and Amazon Web Services for the first time and creating a decent app!
What we learned
I've never used a static site generator before, so Hugo was a learning curve of sorts. Figuring out how to design in AWS - also my first time using it! - was also an exercise in itself! I also learned about lexicons.
What's next for Language Learner
Building out content!
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.