

Show HN: 415-483-1860 twilio-translator - jdavid

@andrewacove and i built this in a few hours at the apihackday.  if you like it tweet it up.<p>this is mostly for fun, but it should translate any phrase to the best of the twilio transcription service.
======
mgkimsal
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.

~~~
jdavid
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.

~~~
mgkimsal
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 :)

------
bartman
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!

~~~
andrewacove
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.

~~~
jdavid
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.

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

~~~
jdavid
yeah, that happens when heroku can't respond.

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

~~~
jdavid
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.

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

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

