Twilay

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Inspiration

Hearing loss and speech impairment affect more than a billion people in the world. Communication through traditional phone calls is impossible for them

What it does

Twilay bridges SMS and voice calls using the Twilio API and Google Voice Recognition. People with speech or hearing impairment can make or accept phone calls through text messages.

• Users need to associate their regular phone numbers with Twilay numbers.
• Users can initiate phone calls by sending text messages from regular phone numbers to their designated Twilay numbers.
• Once users' Twilay numbers receive phone calls, text notifications are sent to their regular phone numbers.
• After the two parties are connected, text messages are converted to voice automatically, and vice versa

How we built it

We built our backend in NodeJS and hosted the server on AWS to connect our endpoints with Twilio

Challenges we ran into

We tried using Twilio's transcription API for speech recognition. However, there was too much delay for real time communication. Then we tried Google Cloud Speech Recognition. Fortunately the delay was much shorter.

Since we were not familiar with Twilio API, we tried building the backend using PHP, Java, and Node. In the end, we found that Node is much more efficient to integrate in our case.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Achieve real-time communication between SMS and voice calls. Improve transcription speed with Google Cloud Speech Recognition

What we learned

Working with Twilio, Google Cloud, AWS, and Node

What's next for Twilay

• Support for more languages
• Real time translation

Built With

• amazon-web-services
• google-cloud-speech
• node.js
• twilio