Transcribe Now - : Unlocking Cross-Cultural Language Understanding
Tags: aihackathon, learnings, educationaltool, travel
Published: 2023-06-30 20:43:35

## Overview
In a world of diverse cultures, travelers face the challenge of cross-cultural language understanding. Language barriers can leave them feeling disconnected, relying on non-verbal cues to navigate conversations. Curiosity and the desire to bridge the gap intensify, yearning to unravel rich traditions and stories. This universal struggle reminds us that language holds the key to profound understanding, empathy, and meaningful connections. Embrace the beauty of cultural diversity as we break these barriers together with Transcribe Now Application.

## Problem Statement
In today's globalized world, cross-cultural communication poses a significant challenge for travelers and individuals seeking to connect with people from different backgrounds. Language barriers hinder effective interaction, leading to missed opportunities for meaningful conversations, cultural understanding, and building connections.

## Proposed Solution
Transcribe Now is a simple web application powered by advanced speech-to-text technology and machine learning algorithms,travelers can embark on their journeys with confidence, knowing they have a powerful tool at their fingertips. 
They can easily communicate, ask questions, and engage in meaningful discussions, regardless of language differences. The app empowers users to unlock the full potential of cross-cultural experiences, fostering deeper connections, and facilitating genuine cultural exchange.

The highlight- Transcribe Now makes it easier than ever! Enjoy seamless communication without the need for authentication. Experience the freedom of instant cross-cultural understanding at your fingertips.

## Tech Stack
    NodeJs, React, Transformer tools

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## Our Approach 
Transcribe Now has two approach

<u>**The Frontend**</u>
This is our user interface where the User get to see the homepage and on clicking "Get Started button" they are redirected to another page where they can record an audio in get the transcripted words displayed in real-time. It also has a start and stop button to control the recordings. 

![the Frontend view](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/as60174t7ze8u58lhaem.png)

**stage 1: collect recordings**
The app uses browser MediaAPI to allow recordings  while in the browser, By clicking the start button, the recordings start automatically and the user can have control of stopping it to.

**stage 2: Generate chunks of audio file**
Splitting it into chunks of audio file so it could be passed as a "blobUrl" to the backend for transcription.

**stage 3: Pass to the Frontend**
Created a function that accepts the generated chunks of audio file as an argument and passing it as a formdata, Then making a POST request to the specified url for transcription.

<u>**The Backend**</u>

**stage 1: Endpoint creation**
created an endpoint using Express.js server that handles a POST request and sends a request to an endpoint

**stage 2 : Connect the Data from the frontend**
Grab the url from the frontend "AudioBlob" through the API request body and converts to an acceptable format for transcription.

**stage 3: Transcription**
Transcribes the recordings using Whisper Transformer model  and sends the transcripted words to the Frontend.

## Outcomes and Learnings During the Process
It was not an easy Journey to be honest, Identifying the team members strengths and weakness and working on a project was one of our biggest challenge. We had to try out a couple of tech stack and AWS services to get the one to suit our interest.
Initially we tried using a Python environment for our backend by maximizing AWS lambda and API gateway and AWS Amplify to help us use the transformer tool but the file size was too large and then we tried Amazon Elastic File System(EFS) but we still could not get the app working.

Reading through the docs again after taking a lot of time trying to debug our code, we decided to go through with Nodejs because that was something we were more familiar with to build the Project.

## Lessons
For my team, these are the couple of things we learnt while working on the project

- Reading docs- we definitely read lots of them
 
- Teamwork 
showed up when we all tried to bring our strengths and skills to the project

- Brainstorming
We did a lot of that when we tried getting a project idea, why we should with it and how well it suited the project Instructions

I am sure every member of the team must have learnt a couple of things from the hackathon experience

## Way Forward
We hope to modify and refactor our codebase,To help people easily navigate through the codebase. 

For the application, we have our users interest at heart and we definitely hope to integrate more language translation on it.