SPEAKEASY

My university has a team project module in the first year for all computer science courses. All students are placed in tutorial groups of 6-8 people and tasked with designing and creating a data-driven web app.

My team decided to build an app that would help people communicate when they couldn’t speak. This was partly inspired by one member catching a particularly bad case of fresher’s flu and losing his voice. Existing options like Google Translate weren’t designed for real-time conversation and we saw an opportunity to mix the concepts of text-to-speech and predictive text.

My role in the project was to design the website then work with another team member to implement the frontend. This included HTML, CSS, Jinja templates, and JavaScript.

The result is a web app that speaks what you type, as you type it. Keyboard shortcuts let you quickly insert predicted words and entire phrases, and you can even customise these ‘keyboards’ of phrases to fit your everyday use of the app. You could also change the gender and accent of the voice, and these settings were saved along with your account in a database.

We are in the process of hosting the finished app on PythonAnywhere. Once this is complete, I will include the link to it here.