Name: Luc
Role: I make make software tools to assist with language learning. I have several Anki addons that I maintain, you can read more about it here: https://languagetools.anki.study/
Description: This project, which I call Vocab.Ai, is an online spreadsheet specialized in language-learning. The spreadsheet portion is of course powered by Baserow. My previous project required me to develop a backend (python module + flask API) which unifies a number of cloud language APIs, such as text to speech, translation, transliteration and dictionary lookup. I wanted to make the capabilities of this backend available in an online spreadsheet, this led me to search for online spreadsheet components, and that’s how I found baserow. The logical thing was to connect by backend to Baserow. I started with a fork of Baserow, and later converted by project to a plugin, which makes it MUCH more maintainable. I’m very happy about the plugin system.
Baserow table:
In the screenshot below, the “French Sentences” is the input column, containing french text. The “English Translation” column is automatically generated, either in bulk when the user adds the column, or row by row, as the user enters new text in “French Sentences”. It uses the DeepL translation service, but others are available. All thanks to the the power of custom field types.
https://app.vocab.ai/public/grid/jAwakMp8_NinDcpKMY4gGM4dUNpqmxY-MemZVaHUvvE
You can sign up on the VocabAi baserow instance here: https://app.vocab.ai
Video: here’s a tutorial video explaining how to enable Chinese transliteration: Vocab.Ai: how to automatically generate Pinyin from Chinese text - YouTube
Tools used: The main components are of course baserow, and my language processing backend which I call cloud language tools. The code for my plugin is licensed under GPL: GitHub - Language-Tools/baserow-vocabai-plugin: VocabAi - plugin for Baserow database
it’s unfortunately not trivial to deploy, because you need API keys for the various cloud services such as Azure, Google, and those cost money and are not easy to setup. If there’s interest, I could create a “free-only” version of my plugin for those who just want the free services (like Libre Translate translation).