SameLanguage

Inspiration

As a team of bi-lingual speakers, we realized that languages are a real problem in professional spaces as well as in casual conversation. We aimed to solve this problem by building a chatbot that translates languages in-conversation.

What it does

Unlike most chatbots, our chatbot does not need any slash commands or settings. Instead, users simply add the bot into their slack conversation, and the bot detects each user's language and translates messages accordingly.

How we built it

Using node.js, we applied the botkit javascript library to create the bot's backend. After getting simple Input/Output out of our chatbot, we focused on translating the input using Yandex Translation API. Then we aimed for a smoother user experience, by detecting languages and storing them for each user, rather than specifying languages using slash commands.

Challenges we ran into

Since we were new to node.js, we had some problems involving syntax. Additionally, there were problems with version control since we couldnt push to github. This is because our api keys and slack bot tokens were disabled whenever it was detected that they were uploaded onto github.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Fortunately, we accomplished our project with polish, (rare for hackathons) and we learned a lot about REST APIs as well as a good amount of node.js.

Built With

• botkit-api
• javascript
• node.js
• yandex-api