Lingo Lift

Inspiration

One of our friends is an international ELL (English Language Learner) who recently came to Canada. He felt that it was hard to follow along in lectures since it was in a language that was foreign to him. Due to this, he felt left out during lectures since it was difficult for him to engage and participate in class. We built Lingo Lift to help support his learning and make him feel more included in the classroom and educational settings.

What it does

Lingo Lift is an all-in-one platform that helps ELL students understand lectures. It has many features including:

Live Translation: Listens to lecture content and transcribes and translates it into a language of your choice. This translation is live so the student can follow along in real time.
Summarization: AI summarization tool that can summarize lecture content depending on your English level.
Audio Translation: Listen to lecture content in your own language in your own time.
Voice Tutor: Creates a call with an AI bot that can help tutor you in the subject and improve your English.
Chat History: All previous chats are saved in a sidebar, and we have a quick search feature for easy access.

How we built it

We built the project using Nextjs, Typescript, Tailwind CSS, and Shadcn UI. For the technologies, we used Azure speech to text for realtime translation, Elevenlabs TTS for multi lingual support, ElevenLabs Agent for the language tutor with Gemini 2.5 as the model. For AI summaries we used Gemini 2.5 flash, Postgres and storage was hosted on Supabase, and we used Auth0 for Authentication.

Challenges we ran into

We faced some challenges with client-side rendering when setting up the ElevenLabs API. It also took us a while to set up Auth0 for authentication. We also had many minor bugs with the UI every time we wanted to add a feature.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of getting the speech to text and translation work live. Originally, you had to record audio first, and then it would translate separately later. But eventually we were able to get it to work!

What we learned

It was half of our team's first time using React, Auth0, and PostgreSQL. It was also some of our first times using Git to collaborate, so we learned a lot of Git commands.

What's next for Lingo Lift

We want to add a few more features to Lingo Lift, such as:

Uploading content: Uploading lecture slides to get a summary in their own language.
Quiz Tool: Simulates test conditions by creating a practice quiz on the material. Ideally, the quizzes would get progressively harder depending on performance.
Study Planner: Helps students track tasks and deadlines to stay on top of their work.
Resources: Provides links to additional material on the content to support learning.
Sign Language: Adding a sign language interpreter as well would make our website more inclusive towards deaf and hard of hearing students.