Phonic Factory

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  Phonic Factory

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  What are phonics?

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  The draft interface of the website.

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  The reader can hear how each phonic is pronounced.

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  Our word processing demonstration.

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  Example of how text will be broken down into phonics.

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  Example of how users can input their own text to be then broken down into phonics.

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  There are multiple pages.

Inspiration

I work as a math tutor. The kids at my work don't know how to sounds out words. When they encounter an unknown word in a math problem, they simply sit there. Once I read them the problem, however, they are able to solve it. Their poor reading abilities make it seem as if they have poor math abilities. In order to help their reading independence, we built a web app designed to teach them phonics.

What it does

Phonic Factory is a gamified web application that specializes in teaching those who want to improve their English reading skills. This is accomplished through teaching how each word can be sounded out in our online texts or texts the user uploads.

How we built it

We built the demonstration using simple Html, CSS, and JS. We built a syllable detection, text-to-speech, and image-to-text recognizer using Python.

Challenges we ran into

Since this has never been done at this scale before, there are no easily accessible full databases of English phonics. Furthermore, text-to-speech also has a very difficult time pronouncing individual syllables.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of getting the syllable generator working with text-to-speech. We are proud of the demonstrations we've created and feel they capture the essence of the web app, as much as a rough draft can.

What we learned

We learned that we cannot assume a database would be readily available. We learned python modules gTTs, streamlit, syllapy and their pros and cons for our particular product. We learned to start smaller than we might want to and grow from there.

What's next for Phonic Factory

Creating a machine learning algorithm to recognize syllables and format them in a way that text-to-speech can read them properly. Allowing users to upload images of their own text which could then be broken down into phonics using the same algorithm. Adding features such as switching between full words and phonics.

Built With

• css3
• gtts
• html5
• javascript
• python
• streamlit
• syllapy