Inspiration
There are soooo many people on this planet, but we don't connect with billions of them. Why? A huge reason for that is the language barrier. What if there was some way to chat with other, regardless of their language. When we were introduced to the Google Cloud Translate API, we knew we could build a solution for this global problem.
What it does
Our solution is a chat application where users can message each other in any language they choose. The message will be translated to the language of the recipient. For example, if an English user sends "Hello" to a French recipient, the french recipient will receive the message as "Bonjour",
How we built it
We used the Google Cloud Translate API to translate any messages into a target language. To implement server communication between the users, we used socketio. This also allowed us to create separate chat rooms, increasing the scalability of our project. To store any data, such as account details, message data, or room data, we used MongoDB and communicated with it from our python flask backend.
Challenges we ran into
A major challenge we faced was displaying the messages in the correct language. Since SocketIo sends messages to all users in a room, it was difficult finding a way to display the original message on the sending end and displaying the translated message on the receiving end. Another difficulty we faced was implementing the Cloud Translation API, especially since we are all beginners
Accomplishments that we're proud of
As students who don't have much coding experience, we are proud that we were able to complete our project within the given deadline. We are also proud that we were able to learn so many languages and technologies over the weekend. We're especially proud of the type of project we chose to create. We truly believe that this can act as a bridge between all people, regardless of the language they speak.
What we learned
Our team was made up of beginners (1 of us has only coded for a month), so there were a lot of things that we learned. Since we've never made a website before, we had to learn Javascript, HTML, and CSS. We also learned how to use MongoDB and make a flask app.
What's next for GlobatChat
What's next for GlobalChat, is we would like to add a feature that allows users to meet each other randomly all across the globe. We would also like to add a video and voice feature that will allow everyone to have a deeper connection. By adding the voice feature, this means we would also like to add a voice translation program so our goal of having 0 language barriers can be fulfilled.
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