Polyglot Bot

Inspiration

During COVID-19, people are surfing the net more than ever. However, the language barrier is a big obstacle for cross language reading or communication, so we came up with the idea of a robot that translates phrases into your language and reads it to you.

What it does

While browsing the web, Polyglot Bot will read out loud any English phrases that you highlight, translated to a language of your choice.

How we built it

Polyglot Bot is a Google Chrome extension built with Javascript, HTML and CSS, utilizing google cloud services such as translate and text to speech. First, we use chrome storage to store settings and then add listeners to the page so whenever words are selected, it’ll use ajax to post data to google cloud services. After receiving the final mp3 encoded content, it’ll be played on the page.

Challenges we ran into

A major technical issue that we ran into was the fact that our extension would trigger a “Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 429 (Too Many Requests)” error. This was caused by the fact that the translate.googleapis.com site use is very limited. It only allows about 100 requests per one hour period and thereafter returns a 429 error (Too many requests). A design challenge that we ran into was creating a simple and intuitive user interface. This included designing an easy-to-use dropdown menu that displays all of the languages that are available and determining the best way to allow users to disable/enable the translation function. We switched between several different dropdown menu designs and extension layouts, until we finally settled on the current design.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of creating a fully functioning product that can be of use to people around the world. We are also proud of ourselves for being capable of learning new things quickly and earning a good result in our first experience attending a Hackathon.

What we learned

We learned to brainstorm ideas quickly and expand those ideas into functions and features of our project. We started from scratch and learned as we built our project. We went from absolute beginners to adequate web developers.

What's next for Polyglot Bot

We hope to add more functionality to our program and offer more customizations for the voice and accent. Future features may include, displaying the translated text and saving user history.