Decode

Inspiration

There are thousands and thousands of languages in the world. It can be hard for any single person to communicate with all of them. We were inspired to make this app for the sole purpose of overcoming the language barrier. With Decode, you are able to communicate with almost anyone from anywhere in the world in real-time. This enables a more natural and fluid conversation

What it does

Decode translates languages in real-time and reads it out loud to the user. Unlike other translator apps, Decode is unique because it understands the sentence structure of what is being spoken, and provides a conversational language platform for the user. Decode can analyze the conversation and look for words/phrases that may be important to the user. For example, if the conversation mentions a place, Decode will identify it and supply information to the user about that place such as its address, nearby landmarks, region/country and so on.

How we built it

Decode uses the Microsoft’s Cognitive Services to provide real-time translations. In addition, we used Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning to have a more conversational translations.

Challenges we ran into

Our main challenge was dealing with different file types and data formats since changing file types is extremely challenging on iOS and many of which we had to learn and understand how audio formats worked.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are mainly proud of our real-time translation functionality. Decode picks up speech precisely with nearly 95% accuracy. It ignores background noises and focuses clearly on the speech. We are also proud of our sleek user interface that makes the app easily navigable and presentable.

What we learned

We learned how to deal with various kinds of file types within iOS. We also learned about Android development and the use of Android Studio. We decided to also build Decode on Android as well. This taught as many things about the Java, Android Studio, etc.

What's next for Decode

We plan on expanding the number of languages available for translation. We plan on adding more and more remote languages to the app so that the user is able to communicate with literally any person on the planet. We would also like to add Image recognition so that the user can translate anything they point their phone to in real-time.