Show HN: 415-483-1860 twilio-translator | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: 415-483-1860 twilio-translator

21 pointsjdavid13 comments

@andrewacove and i built this in a few hours at the apihackday. if you like it tweet it up.

this is mostly for fun, but it should translate any phrase to the best of the twilio transcription service.

Pretty slick. Would be nice to have a bit more in the way of menus at some point - press 1 to repeat the phrase, 2 to do a new one, etc. Nice job.

dude, remember this is 4 hours work, in a hackday environment with weak wifi. api's were breaking left and right, but the good folks at apigee, heroku and twilio were responsive.

i guess twilio does not handle 301 redirects for audio files, and apigee does not handle utf8 in their debug console, but other than that the app is just an MVP hackday thing, and we got it to work.

andrew and I will probably improve the menu for any language supported by the Microsoft Translate API.

twilio is awesome for this sort of thing, but my server languages are php and python, so i will probably port it to app engine so that it only costs per request, rather than instance time.

also since twilio knows the incoming phone number, we will probably allow you to set a default language or something.

You can build a many very easily with Twimlets: http://labs.twilio.com/twimlets/menu

I was not criticizing your efforts. It's good work - would have even been impressive at 8/10/12/20 hours.

Yeah, a default language is a good idea too - I hadn't thought of that.

Again, nice job. Congrats :)

Just called and choose Japanese, after asking me what to translate I got to the (pleasant, it seems Japanese?) waiting music but eventually hung up after 5 minutes because nothing was happening. Choosing Spanish or French immediately hung up on me. Cool hack though!

Every now and then, Twilio fires the transcription callback with a blank transcription. Unfortunately, we didn't encounter the problem until about 20 minutes before demo time, at which point it started to happen pretty frequently, including during the demo. There isn't a code path in place for when that happens yet.

we could call someone back, if we can't modify the call. hmm? I wonder if there is a call back if the modify call fails.

"We're sorry, an application error has occurred. Good bye!" :(

yeah, that happens when heroku can't respond.

Sorry, a bit confused. Is this some sort of an IVR in the US?

i guess you could say that, but the language select is performed by dial tones only.

more accurately it's a dialtone menu system with a transcription callback to an conference call of one. the largest amount of error happens with the transcription service, both in how long it takes, and.... what it produces.

we found that the translation part is actually pretty accurate when compared to the transcription.

i am currently seeking out if there are better near real time transcription options.

Just tested it out, worked like a charm. Very handy!

good job! tried it out and it seemed to work as expected.

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