Anemone

Inspiration

When my parents immigrated to America, they struggled to learn English. When conversing to people, they were often looked upon differently based on the way they spoke words. Spoken American language is not grammatically correct. Therefore, it is a struggle for ESL (English as Second Language) people to communicate effectively. We want to create something that can help people catch this problem early on. The name was inspired by a scene in the Pixar movie, Finding Nemo, where Nemo struggled to properly pronounce the word "anemone" to his school teacher.

What it does

This app helps the user to correctly pronounce certain words when spoken though a built-in microphone. The user says a sentence and the app tries to recognize it, giving a score on how good was the pronunciation. It also provides a text box for the user to type in a sentence. The app will respond by repeating the sentence with the right pronunciation.

How I built it

We used Android Studio and Java to build the app.

Challenges I ran into

Using the Android Studio was very complicated. There were a lot of trouble and technical difficulties setting up the platform and trying to use it. We experienced much trial and error involving code and use of resources. However, we were able to complete the project with the features we wanted.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We are proud of being able to finish the project within the desired time limit.

What I learned

We learned the Android ecosystem and how to use it with third party APIs

What's next for Anemone

We hope that it can be useful for people starting out on the English language. Our next feature would be a built-in dictionary and thesaurus for the spoken words, as well as showing multiple choices for similarly spoken sentences.