Bike and Learn
Challenge
Have you ever had a feeling that you can spend the cycling time with benefit? For example, you can study English during this time. But your hands are usually busy and you have to touch the screen while using regular applications. That is rather dangerous during the cycling.
So, the application, that enables you to learn new words without extra body movements, is necessary for you! We want to present you our own product, Bike and Learn, which is based on a voice synthesizer and voice-recognition technology. This application enables you to learn new words as well as to improve your English when you are riding a bike!
Requirements
For comfortable usage the application contains the following features
- It should not require manual input in the learning mode
- It should let users easily add new unknown words
- It must allow users to adapt the mode of word (speed, pause) playback
- It must be controlled with voice commands
- It must show the learning statistics
- It must have the lists of frequently used words to learn
Solution
The popularity of such an application strongly depends on how easily users can add new unknown words to their training program. At best, it takes one or two mouse clicks. In order to provide such comfort for the application, we built a Website as well as a plug-in for a browser. On the Website users can make their own lists of words or choose existing ones, which are offered by the application.
By means of the plug-in, which is built in the browser Chrome, users can add new words to their lists while reading an article or surfing the Internet. It goes like this – while reading a text in the browser, a user comes across a new word.
Then he/she does a double click and a panel, with variants of translation and transcription, emerges. So, the user chooses any variant he/she likes and that is it, the word is added to the list! During the next cycling this word will certainly be heard again by the user.
The peculiarity of this application is in the development score and support. Translation and word list creation are done by Google. The same situation is with different language support, developers just gave an opportunity to choose a language, which the user intends to study, and his/her mother-tongue. Everything else is done by the system.
The application is also optimized to be used in regular practice, that is, when your hands are free. So, the user can choose by himself/herself when he/she wants to move on to the next word. This is useful when, for example, the user is on a public transport.
Implementation
The development was divided into two stages (the development of the Website and the one of the application). The Website was built on the stack of Microsoft technologies. In particular we tried to apply new approaches, just to abstract from mainstream and broaden the mind (AngularJS + Dapper ORM + Tiny iOC + Twitter Bootstrap + Google Protobuf + Asp.net MVC Next + Mongo DB). During the IOS application development the following technologies were used: ObjectiveC + UIKit + AFNetworking + AVFoundation + REST + JSON +SQL.
Bike and Learn is a bright example of an innovative training program. This application gives a chance to learn new words more efficiently and lets users combine business – learning new words – with pleasure – cycling.