sPeach

Where your speeches become as sweet as peaches.

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Inspiration

We were deeply inspired by Malala's story. She didn't fear the death threats from terrorist groups: she wanted to spread a very important message.

The level of confidence and public speaking skills that she possesses should be an asset that anyone can learn. This is especially important for developing nations, as there aren't enough resources to help them share their experiences with the world.

Public speaking is key to thriving in society. High-level communications skills are vital to someone's success and well-being. Our goal was to help provide this service to those who are less privileged. And that is why we created sPeach.

What it does

App The app's intention is to improve your public speaking skills. It does this by listening to your speech, and analyzing multiple aspects of it. The app states which words were repeated the most, as well as provide professional tips on how to further improve your communication ability.

Website Our website's main purpose is to explain our motivation for starting this project. In addition, we explain how the app operates, more about our team, and a functioning "contact us" section.

How we built it

App The official sPeach app was created in Android Studio, with the assistance of the Google Text-to-Speech API. Initially, the API was tested in Python, in order to validate the functionality. Upon success, we decided to move on to creating the Android app. In order to record the speech, Google's API was called upon, and would save the audio of the user as a string. This string would be analyzed in order to find out which words were repeated. This was achieved by making individual arrays on words, in order to move the same words into the same array. The size of the array would indicate how many times the user said the word. Alongside this, the tips feature is an ordered list of compiled strings on sophisticated public speaking.

Website sPeach has an official website(http://speach.tech/). After viewing many professional websites, we drew a framework of our website. We compiled our personal photos, made unique logos, customized the navigation bar, and added a "contact us" section. All of this was created from scratch using data validation, and various languages (html, css, js). Our domain was provided by domain.com, and under the hosting services of InfinityFree. We published our site through AppZilla, making it public for everyone to see.

Challenges we ran into

Name

After we had come up with an idea, we had difficulty on agreeing on a name. Our product's name varied from "Sbeak" to "Speak" to "Squeak" to "Speech Trainer". After pondering for a long time, we decided to take inspiration from Apple. Seeing how there is no correlation between apples and operating systems, we came to the conclusion that our name doesn't have to necessarily reflect what our service is. However, sPeach was perfect, as it connected to our motto "Where your speeches become as sweet as peaches".

App

As said before, Python was used to make an outline of how we wished the app to function. It was difficult to get the program to speak without any interruptions/delays. Often, it would take long pauses. We overcame this issue with multiple tests, and diligent research. After coming up with the Python prototype, it was time to start working on the Android app/server. The first conflict that arose was executing Google's API: the implementation of the API was very tedious and often resulted in many errors. On top of this, getting authentication keys was a hassle. In total we had 33 issues, all of which were minute. These minuscule errors would constantly result in numerous crashes, and took a fair amount of debugging.

Website/Server

On the website, we have a team section. In this section, we provide photos and a simple biography of each team member. One of the problems we ran into, was how to keep all 4 team members on the same line. Even though we accomplished this, it looked too crowded, because of our design. That is why we decided to move one team member to the middle bottom.

The other problem we encountered was working with the "contact us" form. We wanted to add data validation, which would verify if the user inputted in all fields, and if the two emails they inputted matched, like on a real-world professional website. We ran into many errors when creating this, namely, the website didn't validate the input, and immediately went to the submitted form website. Other instances, it wouldn't allow the user to go to the next page, even if they had inputted the correct information. We fixed this through diligent research, and simply perseverance.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Before this hackathon, 3 of our 4 team members have never created a website or worked with domains. We are very proud of being able to achieve such a well-structured website, and what we consider a milestone in our learning.

What we learned

We learned how to successfully use an API: search for the right one, download it and import it into our programs, and getting authentication keys. Next, we learned how to create a dynamic website. Initially, we looked at many website generators, such as Wix or Weebly. Instead of making a drag-and-drop site, we decided to code one from scratch. We gained a significant amount of knowledge in the areas of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Finally, we immersed ourselves in the world of server side web development. After getting a domain, we had to move our site onto a host. To make our site public, we used AppZilla to import our site files to the web. All of this knowledge that we learned in the past 24 hours will be extremely useful as we move through our coding careers.

What's next for sPeach

After this hackathon, we wish to continue this project, and expand it further. First, we want to completely finish our app: it will be user-friendly, more efficient, better aesthetics, and have more speech interpreting functionality. Second, we would like to expand our language reach. Currently, we are constricted to English, but in the future, we wish to expand to other common languages, and later, lesser-known ones. Next, our app is indicated to the less privileged, but we hope to provide this product to the entire world. Finally, we want to partner with big speech development teaching companies (ToastMasters, TedX, etc). We want to work with these influential companies, understand their speech course, and implement their teaching techniques into our app and make it available to all. Though these future plans seem ambitious, we will persevere to create and achieve our ultimate vision: quoting TEDx, "Ideas Worth Spreading".

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