Transform your smart devices to intelligent communicators
Tags: opensource, programming, productivity, beginners
Published: 2021-09-29 20:20:26

Ever built a product which you yourself used the next day? Well, I did! I had a Frenectomy and I was restricted to speak for the next 48 hours. That time, Donna came to the rescue!

 {% github betaoverflow/donna%}

According to a survey of 601 people, 57.9 % of participants experienced communication difficulties, with 23.5 % reporting severe difficulties. Only 75.1 % of participants communicated verbally; more than half found communicating with professionals and non-familiar partners difficult. 

Communication is the fundamental basis for any individual to live a normal life. People facing trouble in communicating with others can often be a victim of social isolation. For example, most people who are hearing disabled are also speech disabled. In an extensive research conducted in various domains, it was found that hearing impairment and inability to verbally express oneself leads to lack of equal opportunities as well as leads to problems even in everyday communication. 

We wanted to contribute to help this cause so we came up with Donna. For all the suits fans, you know who Donna is. For those who don't, Donna is a strong female character from a famous T.V. show called Suits. She was one person who everyone could count on and whatever the situation might be she was always there for her dear ones. With all the difficulties specially-abled people feel, we hope to never let them feel lonely and helpless having Donna by their side.

![Donna User Interface](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/y7ir2qb6mz91forq0aug.png)





## How it works 🤓
Donna is an application that always has your back. Through this hack, we want to make sure specially-abled people never feel helpless. Donna supports people with disabilities by allowing them to communicate. It has special cards for a lot of statements people might normally use and need in day to day life routines. Moreover, we have a facility for storing an identity card, emergency contact and other important information to make them feel even more secure. There is also a provision of typing your own statements and using them to communicate with others. The app uses the flutter_tts package for text to speech conversion. Both the web and app is created on flutter along with firebase for user authentication. Although Donna can help a lot of people, we especially made this to help the deaf people who find it really difficult to communicate with the outside world which leads to them not opening up to new people.


## How we built it 🧑‍💻
We used flutter to build the frontend and Firebase as our backend service for authentication and database. We used a flutter package to convert text to speech. We added the feature in which the users can create personalised voice cards (a card on clicking which converts the text to speech) through a form. These custom cards are stored in the database for user convenience and are available upon login.

<hr>

Donna was built in Ability Hacks powered by Abilify, USA in which we were the winner but there are a lot of features we have planned and some which need the support of community.

![image](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/ixuwftxb83frs48jdnj5.png)

## What's next for Donna 🔥
Next, we want to add more and more categories and functionalities in the app to try and put all the phrases that might be required in day-to-day activities. We also wish to add hospital support and on-call emergency services in the future. In addition to that, we want to make sure, we take care of their mental health as well, so we would also be adding a mood tracker which tracks a person's happiness index every day and helps them make the graph go up!
 
## Support us to empower everyone 🚀
Taking this prototype to production needs your help. The code is open-sourced and we would love to see your contribution:
- Check the <a href="https://github.com/betaoverflow/donna">Github Repo </a> 😎
- Fork the Repository 🍴
- Star the Repo ⭐️
- Send the PR or create an issue 🤓

Incase you like the  <a href="https://github.com/betaoverflow/donna">project</a> and want to help our community drop a star to increase the visibility. And, if you want to discuss more, would love to have a chat with you on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/aniket-pal/)