HackGT5 submission - Totomi
- Project leader = YoungBin Byun
- Front End = Hee Kim
- Back End = Keun Park
- Contributor = Woongrae Cho
- Front End Designer = Brian Lee
- React-native
The idea of Totomi originated from an urgent email. A student was looking for a notetaker for a class because he was suffering from hearing disability.
About 37.5 million American adults report troubles with hearing. That is about 15% of the American population. Furthermore, more than 360 million people suffer from disabling hearing loss across the globe.
Therefore, we wanted to develop a tool, a seamless integration with their daily life, that can help facilitate everyday conversation with the world. So that our classmate could take a class without needing a notetaker.
Totomi is a mobile application that records and transcribes the conversation into text. There are few services that provides similar functionalities, but most of them focuses on phone conversation, needs an operator to listen and type out the conversation, and/or requires a separate hardware.
Unlike these complicated, high cost solutions, our team utilized newly emerging machine learning libraries that automatically transcribes an audio stream/file within a single mobile application. Now, people can easily access our service without needing a separate hardware or having to worry about service availability.
We used React-Native library to support both Android and iOS devices. React-Native-Voice library invokes machine learning library that processes the audio file in Google Speech API or Apple Speech Recognition API. We chose to build mobile application, because more than 77% adults in United States owns smartphones and more than 4.78 billion people in the world has access to smartphones. Because it was developed through React-Native library, Totomi has access to both Android and iOS communities, which increases accessibility of the app. We wanted the design to be clean, functional, extremely organized, and easy to use. The design and implementation of our application reflects that goal to reach out to more people with hearing disabilities