Speaking in Code

Inspiration

The desire to code without actually needing to be at a computer

What it does

Takes a spoken description of a function, and converts it into code. Currently we support Ruby, Python and Java (as other languages have less orthodox sounding names which tripped up the API a little in testing)

For instance, the following instruction: declare a function in ruby called print the arguments which takes one argument, an integer, and returns an integer, that prints the first argument will product the following output:

def print_the_arguments(x0) do
  puts x0.inspect
end

How we built it

We took a speech transcript generated though the Deepgram api (we wrote Scala.JS for the Deepgram JavaScript SDK to do this) & then parsed the text & searched for patterns describing the functions to be generated and what language to generate them in.

Challenges we ran into

Coding while tired = mistakes - also dealing with unexpected data from the API was much harder than expected (ie. we expected "c" - as in the programming language - to be returned as see or sea, however it was sometimes also returned as "z" and "she", which made detecting when a user was targeting C much harder, and that's without accounting for any other variations which may have sprung up)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Compiling human-friendly language to a transferable base which can easily be transferred to most imperative programming languages

What we learned

A lot about APIs and user focused design, as this the largest human-interaction & web focused project any of us have undertaken - also how to enjoy ourselves at hackathons