Wordsmith

With the help of our Chrome extension, you can get the pronunciation, synonyms, and antonyms of words with just one click!

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Inspiration

All the members of our team come from many different cultural backgrounds. Thus, we have seen many people we know struggle to understand the text as they read, especially if English is not their primary language. Therefore, we were inspired to create Wordsmith to aid those with difficulties reading English, such as new English learners and those with disabilities.

What it does

Wordsmith is a chrome extension that acts as a miniature dictionary for the user. The user will highlight a word, and the Wordsmith icon will appear in the menu for the user to click. Once the user clicks the icon, a small dictionary user interface will appear for the user. The interface includes:

  • Pronunciation of the word
  • If the word is a noun, adjective or verb
  • The definition of the word
  • Synonyms and antonyms of the word

How we built it

  • The scraping was done using beautiful soup and requests to scrape semantic data off dictionary.com
  • FastAPI and google cloud platforms were used to create a python server to host the main web scraper. The web scraper was also modified to provide better server functionality.
  • The front-end user interface was created using HTML, CSS and javascript to create a chrome extension.

Challenges we ran into

  • We knew nothing going into the hackathon. We simply had a single idea and decided to build off of it, learning everything we needed to build the project as we went.
  • The most challenging part of the hackathon was trying to learn new things on the spot. This was particularly the case for our back-end coders, who had to learn javascript and server building for their parts.

Accomplishments that we're proud of and what we have learned

  • Our team had no knowledge of scraping, server building, creating extensions and user interfaces prior to the hackathon. In the span of approximately 24 hours, we had learned everything needed to create our project.

What's next for Wordsmith

  • As Wordsmith is currently only an English chrome extension, we hope to develop Wordsmith later to work on other browsers and allow the user to change the language.
  • We are also interested in potentially implementing an AI portion so that it can recognize the context in which a word is used and display the definitions, synonyms and antonyms accordingly.
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