I’ve come to the end of this fabulous internship opportunity

Jumping into Week #10 already?

Week 9 is already coming to an end. I cannot believe how far we’ve gotten into our internship. The experience has been rich, and I’ve learned quite a lot about the general research development stages. Not only that, but also with all the things inside and out of JavaScript, node.js, and WebRTC. The experiences have been frustrating in some areas where I think my weaknesses were. There were some bugs or logical errors that I could not get around to solve or fix. Thankfully for my team, they were able to help out with the frustrations I had for some of my tasks. This truly makes me realize that (I’m aware of this, but never have witnessed it myself) that it’s not possible to do every task by yourself and succeed. (With an exception of truly gifted individuals).. There’s always going to be some tasks where I won’t be able to solve or finish it successfully. I’d like to thank my team for their hard work on some of these solutions in the past few weeks! It’s also a benefit to see the coding solutions the others on my team has made and for me to look over their code and see where I did wrong with my code. This has been a great learning experience, as well as a big leap over the class knowledge that I’ve only known with no real world connections. This Research project opened the door into the real world programming problems and solutions as well. I am glad to make this leap, and I hope to continue striving for the best capabilities out of myself as a tech worker.

Polishing up the project

Apptek

With our primary focus on the two ASRs: Web Speech API and Microsoft Azure, we’ve found them to be the perfect candidates for our research project as other ASRs proved to be difficult and complicated mostly to the stuff regarding cloud permissions and API keys. Anyway, we were hoping to get the third ASR into our project. This third ASR is called “Apptek”, is a company based in Northern Virginia. They have a partnership with Gallaudet University for accessibility-related stuff. So with this, we initially had a meeting with them in the first week of REU internship. Unfortunately, it finally came around this week when we got their API key and was able to get started with their ASR. After the meeting this week, we came to a conclusion that we had different goals, we were expecting their ASR to be ready to provide accessibility over a web browser with WebRTC. This isn’t the case as they’ve just started building their project and need feedback and results from the users first before they move on further with the software development cycles. Nobody is blamed here. It’s just an opportunity that would have been great if it was ready to be used in our research project. As we are REU interns, we are only given 10 weeks to work on this research project. That does not give us enough time to do them all (tasks).

WebRTC + Web Speech API

In the past couple weeks, at some point, I did some work on getting the transcript page working with Web Speech API. It was easy because there were guides that I followed in order to get it to work. There were a couple obstacles that I faced, but I overcame it easily. With a bit of understanding and knowledge that I had with Web Speech API, it was time for me to implement this into a WebRTC client. In short, WebRTC platform offers many different methods of communications online, whether it be via video, audio, or instant messages.

So this week, I only worked two days (Thursday, Friday). Last week I worked an extra day (Saturday), so I’ll make up 2 days I missed this week in the 11th week, so expect to see my blog post in the 11th week.

my team has made more progress in this week compared to last week

Third week already?

I cannot believe how fast time has flew in the last three weeks in my REU internship! I am more than grateful for this fantastic experience. The work that I have done has been fun and I did really learn lots, but there’s still a lot to learn especially with the cloud platforms, nodejs, and various services that are dependent on cloud/nodejs.

ASR SDKs

With the first week’s orientation and development environment settled, my co-intern and I could continue working on the Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) assets that include using their Software Development Kits (SDKs) to install both JavaScript(JS) and Console (CLI) samples on our development server. I started the week with a focus on navigating around the IBMcloud (IBMC) console interface with a few audio files. At the time, I did not have any audio files present to use with IBMC ASR. This meant that I had to hunt for a few sample audio files online and make sure that they were open source and no license issues.

First week

In my first week of the REU internship was basically like any other first week, an orientation week, where everything is laid out in front of you and you learn everything there is that surrounds the project and its goals for the next 10 weeks. The only difference this time around is the fact that we are living in amidst the coronavirus crisis. This means I won’t get the opportunity of experiencing the greatness of the REU working with other students and mentors on campus. Nevertheless, I am more than fortunate to be able to work with my mentor in this internship working remotely from the comforts of my home. with this being said, me and my co-intern Emelia Beldon took efforts to set up our development environments on our desktop computers and laptops.