Rakun Talk

Inspiration

At Rakun we are working on tools that make traveling easier for neurodivergent people. Some of our customers, mostly on the autistic spectrum, have issues voicing their needs in certain situations due to being non-verbal or auditory processing challenges. The current solution for this problem are printed communication cards. While this solution works to some extent it is also tedious and can reach its limits fast when encountering unforeseen situations. With Rakun Talk we created a more flexible and interactive solution that can be useful for anyone and essential for some.

What it does

Rakun Talk is an iOS app that offers interactive communication cards.

You can use one of the pre defined cards or create your own to order food, ask for a quiet table or get the correct medicine at the pharmacy. To respond the other person can use the response interface to give you a simple positive or negative reaction.

And when you're abroad Rakun Talk translates your needs for you.

How we built it

Rakun Talk is an iOS app built with Swift/SwiftUI. For translations we use DeepL. For in app purchases we use Revenue Cat.

Challenges we ran into

Initially we wanted to use Apple Translate but we had to switch to DeepL because Apple Translate doesn't support in place translations for iOS versions older than iOS18.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to say that people understood in real life situations what the card is doing and how the response interface works within a few seconds. We were able to order coffee or ask for a quieter table without speaking a word.

What we learned

We learned that a simple tool like this can make a huge difference for some people.

What's next for Rakun Talk

We will talk to more users with various special communication needs to better understand their needs and improve the app accordingly. We will also have another look at Apple Translate for offline translations. And an Android Version could happen soon.

Built With

• deepl
• revenuecat
• swift
• swiftui