Cyber Pal

What you narrate, is what I illustrate.

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Inspiration

It has been claimed that computers and the Internet are two of the most significant developments since the invention of braille for blind people. Individuals who are blind cannot access visual material presented on the computer screen or in printed materials. Digitally illiterate persons, particularly older persons, find it very tricky to handle/operate computer systems. Computers are strange for most of them, and they try to escape from computer technology. In today’s age of constantly changing technology, the elderly are often left behind as they cannot keep up with the fast pace. This often leads to them being socially isolated. Therefore, we proposed an innovative system called Cyber Pal which acts as a voice assistant for such disadvantaged individuals. The system is used to help these individuals have access to the important features of the computer by enhancing the system's quality using speech-to-text features.

What it does

The program carries out major/prime tasks via voice commands given by the user. It uses AI and different python modules to recognize the user’s voice command and do what is asked. The program works as a digital voice assistant that uses Artificial Intelligence, voice recognition, Python language for processing algorithms, and voice synthesis to listen to specific voice commands and return relevant information or perform specific functions as requested by the user. The assistant can open websites like Youtube, Google, Wikipedia, and music player. Furthermore, it can even search on youtube and google. It can inform you current time and date. It can ask you riddles, tell you a joke, tell you current news, and can suggest you some random activity.

How we built it

We kicked off the project by discovering the abundant libraries avaiable in Python to accomplish the tasks like recognizing speech, browsing to websites and methods to include API in the project. Subsequently, we decided what features we can add to CyberPal and ended up with including several attributes to project like open websites like google, youtube, music player and reading news, speaking out riddles, jokes,suggesting fun random activity, adjusting system volume etc. We inspected the various functionalities provided by python libraries and tried to add simple and efficient code for comprehending these features.

Challenges we ran into

Working on a project, online with a team is still a perplexity we were facing as we don't have much experience working under such pressure inducing situation as it is our second hackathon. Even though Github helped a lot in collaborating with each other and allowed us to work together on the code, online communication is still not much efficient but we know that with time and participating in such hackathons will teach us how to deal with such situations. Another mentionable challenge was defining a rigid schedule of doing the things in order to manage time and how to allot how much time to a work is still something we are figuring out.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We overcame the above-mentioned challenges, that too with good time management. We worked together in a team, where everyone was efficient and worked hard for the project, so the end result was awe-inspiring. Learning about python more in depth, all the functionalities that we weren’t aware of before, and successfully implementing all those functionalities. And this project was quite interesting as we learned on how to interact with AI, and to be able to successfully complete this project despite the challenge of learning new technical concepts in a short period of time, we are quite proud of our accomplishments.

What we learned

Time management is something that we will eventually learn, but through this event we got some idea on how to prioritize the work to manage time. We learned how to work under pressure. Team work was also an important lesson through this. We learned how to analyze the expertise of each other, we learned many new technical concepts while working with each other. Along with that, we got to know a lot from each other’s experience. Patience and calmness are the key in such a pressure inducing situation, believe in ourselves and backing each other is very important and that is what helped and motivated us to keep on working on the project and not losing hope against the fear of failure.

What's next for Cyber Pal

Participating in this hackathon boosted the confidence in our team. Now, we feel strong enough to compete and go for more such challenges and face them fearlessly. And hopefully our future road is embarked with much more achievements.

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