Inspiration

We believe that technology brings people together to create a 'global village'. We found that there was a disconnect between hearing and non-hearing people in this technological sphere; there was no easy way (save by looking up individual phrases on YouTube!) to translate from spoken English to ASL. We wanted to fix this!

What it does

  • The program translates spoken words into ASL by listening to a speaker and displaying a video representation of the text in ASL. For example, if a user says "Hello!" into the program, it will display a video of a person signing Hello in ASL.

How we built it

Using a GUI built with tkinter, the user speaks and the program:

  1. Uses the speech_recognition library to capture spoken words
  2. Maps each phrase/letter to each video representation in ASL.
  3. Uses ffmpeg to 'stitch' videos quickly
  4. Uses OpenCV2 to play the video.

Challenges we ran into

  • Overcoming package installation troubles
  • Learning to use all new python libraries (tkinter, pyaudio)
  • Troubleshooting in complex scenarios

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Quick stitching and output of videos
  • That it works!
  • The accuracy of the speech recognition

What we learned

  • How to ask meaningful questions to mentors / Google
  • How to use many libraries via self-teaching
  • How to manage our time and our expectations.

What's next for Pantomime

  • Support for a wider range of words by expanding our video library
  • More than one type of input (text, audio, etc)
  • More than one type of output (various regional dialects of sign language)
  • A wider range of user accessibility functions (slow playback, replay)

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