Relay

## Inspiration

People with disabilities and language barriers often face challenges in conversation. For individuals with disabilities, physical or communication limitations can make it difficult to express themselves effectively. For those with language barriers, they may struggle to understand the conversation or be understood by others. These challenges can lead to feelings of isolation and frustration, as well as misunderstandings and missed opportunities. To address these issues, it is important to create an inclusive and supportive environment where individuals feel comfortable and able to participate fully in conversations. We need assistive technologies to help people in this regards.

## What it does

The idea is to create a mobile application which people can use to conduct their conversations which has voice-to-text, text-to-speech, voice translations and text translations inbuilt to facilitate smoother conversations so that people can actually focus on the conversation instead of worrying about such barriers.

## How we built it

The mobile application is made Flutter and uses socket.io to handle messages with the backend which is made using Nest.js, Prisma ORM, GraphQL, Socket.io, MongoDB, Azure Cognitive Language service and deployed on Azure.

## Challenges we ran into

While building this app we knew that we will have to communicate using WebSockets and that too not normally we had to build custom and efficient WebSockets and also that could work for the language conversion. Another challenge was to test these WebSockets where we learned more in-depth about Postman and how to test WebSockets using that. After that integrating those Web Sockets into the Flutter framework and building a user-friendly UI was a very big and hectic task.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to say that we successfully build the complete application and overcame all the challenges we had while building this revolutionary app. We understood a lot about Azure and the amazing services it provides, and we understood a lot in depth about Postman and created a very good API and Socket Workspace Documentation. Building this whole Application's Prototype was a very big accomplishment for me and my team.

## What we learned

We learned a lot about architecture and building Web Sockets and Gateways for an application at the backend in NestJS. We understood graphql and made its APIs, we also learned about Azure and the Cognitive Language Service it provides. Also, we got to know how to integrate these Web Sockets into Flutter Frontend Application.

## What's next for Relay

This can be extended to one-to-many or many-to-many conversations like speeches, online chatting, live events like workshops, and events with people of multiple nationalities. This will give more chances for people with disabilities to attend such events without fear. They can pay more attention to the actual content of discussions instead of worrying about their disabilities in understanding, conveying, and being themselves and proudly taking part in conversations. We also aim to introduce an IoT solution that can help disabled people more and increase the comfort of our user base.