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. Living in the privileged galaxy of intellects and witnessing a technical revolution in everyday life it is imperative not to overlook the responsibility to utilize technology to contribute to the progress and development of society at large. 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.

What is it? ⛹️‍♂️

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.

Donna is Starware.
This means you're free to use the project, as long as you star its GitHub repository.
Your appreciation makes us grow and glow up. ⭐

Team ✨

Aniket Pal 💻 📖 🤔 📆 🚇

Aabhas Sao 💻 🎨 🚇

Sumana Basu 💻 📖 📹 📢

Nirmal-C 💻 🔌

Instructions 👨‍💻

test email and password

email: [email protected]
password: abc456

How we built it 🧑‍💻

We used flutter to build the app 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 personalized 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.

Challenges we ran into 🥺

We faced numerous challenges throughout the journey. Firstly, being a group of javascript developers this was our first try at Flutter. Us being super ambitious decided to try Go and Redis for the backend and database respectively and were stuck in it for a long time as we had never worked on them. Then finally we decided to change our platform and use Firestore and Firebase along with Flutter. Apart from that, we had to look for a good text to speech conversion model. We checked so many GitHub repositories and packages but we couldn't find one that had very high efficiency. So we finally decided to go with the flutter_tts package. Lastly, due to the time constraints, there were some features initially planned which we were not able to complete but would surely work on it after the hackathon.

Accomplishments that we're proud of 😎

Firstly, we were able to learn so much in just one day including an entire tech stack i.e. app development using Flutter. Along with that we made a lot of features that we didn't even think would be possible to do and we had so much fun creating them. But most importantly, we understand the struggle specially-abled people face in their day-to-day activities and we feel this app might be able to make their life a bit simpler. And this is our biggest achievement. It feels great creating something which can actually help someone and make an impact on someone's life.

What we learned 🤓

Being a group of javascript developers, we tried our hands on Flutter this time. We learnt how to create an onboarding screen, proper navigation, optimize controllers and make API calls. Although we were not able to successfully use Go in the backend we did get to learn about how to create modules and contexts in Go. Finally, we learnt how to connect Flutter with Firebase and use it for authentication and real-time data manipulation.

Built With 💕

• Flutter
• Dart
• Firebase
• Firestore
• Cloudinary
• Docker
• Go lang
• Redis
• Text-to-Speech Converter

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 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!