Our project is inspired by sustainability and accessibility. We are empowered to bring about inclusiveness to improve social sustainability, economic sustainability, and bring equal opportunities. Our application allows for both a speech-to-text and text-to-speech summarization. In this way, our application enables people with disabilities, e.g., the visually impaired, people who are unable to speak, individuals with dyslexia, and people with ADHD. Furthermore, it allows users to use their time more efficiently and allocate time to tasks that are more important.
Our web application tool provides a speech-to-text and text-to-speech summarization. It allows user to input text into a dialog box or speak aloud information that can be then summarized and displayed as text or played as audio.
We used Figma for the UX design and built the front end of the page using React.js. With the help of Co-here's API, we are able to summarize paragraphs and implement a text-to-speech as well as a speech-to-text feature in our project.
Most of us are not fond of front-end development using JavaScript so we spent a long time trying to figure out how to implement our Figma prototype into reality without constantly bothering the mentors within a 5 km radius.
We had no prior experience in dealing with API or using React so being able to finish a product within 24 hours is huge accomplishment to us. The idea of doing speech-to-text and text-to-speech seemed tricky to us at first, but with researching and implementing it turned out to be pretty simple but it was also a good learning curve. We are also proud of our AI implementation (NLP) using Cohere.AI in this project.
In the span of less than 23 hours (thanks daylight savings), we have figured out how to build a working webpage from scratch and embedded a fascinating API from a fascinating company to our page that we hope would benefit a lot of people and bring inclusivity towards technology.
In the future, we would love to make it more accessible for people from all backgrounds to use our technology and increase its inclusivity by allowing a mobile implementation for speechLess.