Inspiration
The inspiration for this project came from finding new ways to not only improve accessibility for chess, but also to make new ways for other people to experience playing chess. We wanted to make a chess game that allowed easier access for chess play to users with impairments. Additionally, we could use this to make a “blind” version of chess, which would test players’ ability to memorize the board and play against their friends.
What it does
It is a command-line chess game run on a website and utilizes voice-command. It uses speech recognition to take in both players’ inputs adding to the accessibility factor.
How we built it
We used React for the chess game and HTML, CSS and Javascript for the web development. For the speech-recognition, we used and adapted an old speech recognition library and a google speech API. We used Python in the backend to tie it all together.
Challenges we ran into
Aaron: The biggest challenge today thus far, was knowing where to start.
Carlo: With this being my second hackathon, I’d say the biggest challenge I ran into was lack of knowledge and expertise. Another challenge I ran into was waiting til the last minute to ask for help. I also struggled to use and implement Whisper AI causing me to lose a good chunk of my team.
Sam: The biggest challenge I had was finding the confidence to get started and find momentum throughout the project. I felt that I would run into problems and be stuck for hours without any real progress. Normally, I would mentally reset by taking a break, but I thought that due to the time constraint, I had to power through the whole time.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Carlo: Aside from being able to make new connections and successfully help and support my team by creating the parts of the projects I was assigned, the biggest accomplishment that I’m most proud of is the amount of knowledge I gained during the course of this 24-hour event. From the mentors and other students to the documentations to my teammates, there were a lot of things contributing to my success in learning new concepts and toolkits. For instance, one of the mentors constantly educated and walked me through how to efficiently and properly troubleshoot by explaining his thought-processes, explain every detail any concepts I was unfamiliar with, etc. With this, I can confidently say I have the most successful experiences in this hackathon.
Aaron: As a first year student with minimal CS experience, I was blessed to have patient teammates who aided me in explaining concepts and overall creating a good learning environment. They helped overcome the feelings of insecurity about my CS experience.
Sam: Although we did not complete our project, I have plenty of accomplishments to be proud of from this hackathon. First off, I am proud of myself for showing up and putting myself out there to join a group of individuals whom I did not know before the start of the event. And second, I am glad to have struggled through making a chess game and moving individual pieces using a mouse click. Although I could not get the rules of chess to work well, I am glad that I learned so many troubleshooting techniques from the mentors I requested help from.
What we learned
Aaron: Citrus Hack was an extremely valuable experience for me. Throughout my time here, I learned a lot of web development and helped build our website myself, even though it was my first time coding in html and css. Apart from the website, I made attempts to help my teammates with the development of our chess game which utilized javascript and react, although my knowledge was very limited.
Sam: For our project, I mainly focused on the front end experience, using React to create a chessboard and a (roughly) working chess game. Unfortunately, I encountered several issues with integrating the chess functionality that I could not completely solve during the timespan. Through this experience, I learned some valuable skills in collaborating with other coders and troubleshooting problematic code. Although we could not complete it completely, I am still extremely proud of the hard work that my group put into our project! Overall, I thought this event was a great way for me to get out of my comfort zone to continue to challenge my coding abilities.
Sarah: I learned how to learn. I knew nothing about APIs or speech to text recognition or how to parse the output, but eventually got it to somewhat work. If I ever need speech recognition, I know which especially convenient library to use because it wraps multiple APIs. Also just working with other people, communicating updates. First group project trying to code something up. I'm glad I got some exposure and look forward to more hackathons.
Carlo: I learned how to use React within the 24-hour event. I learned how to make a speech recognition library work. I also learned how to use Whisper by OpenAI and be able to make it work. Most importantly, one of the mentors taught me so much about troubleshooting our own code and a plethora of different ways to go about doing so, from console logging to his theory crafting using documentation, etc.
What's next for Voice-Command Chess
There’s a lot we can expand on. We can add more chess modes like blitz chess and chess puzzles, as well as fine tune the speech recognition to work with other languages. We could also train our own speech recognizer to make recognition more accurate.
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