Our Prototype
Interactive Demo at https://www.flinto.com/p/4ccb0f53
Motivation
We want to create a simple and intuitive Japanese-English dictionary for beginning-intermediate Japanese students. Many Japanese dictionary apps are not intuitive for beginning users and are cluttered with unnecessary functionality they will not use. For example, many apps allow users to search by Kanji radicals, handwriting, word category, stroke count, and Japanese keyboard input. We propose a simple new interface that new Japanese students can easily pick up.Our Design
4 Input Types
Handwriting Mode (Handwriting Recognition)
We expect beginner Japanese students to be unfamiliar with the standard Japanese keyboard. A simple method to allow users to input kanji characters is to allow them to draw the character onto the phone screen.
Audio Mode (Voice Recognition)
In addition, users may encounter complex Japanese audio which they do not recognize. In this case, they can replay the audio recording to our app's audio mode. The app will then automatically translate the audio recording and display the corresponding results.
Camera Mode (Optical Character Recognition)
When the user encounters an unfamiliar kanji character, he or she can simply take a picture of the character. Optical Character Recognition software will be used to translate the image to Japanese text.
Keyboard Mode
Finally, our app provides a keyboard mode for users familiar with the standard Japanese keyboard. In this mode, they can input hiragana, katakana, and kanji using their phone's Japanese keybaord.
Display Results
After the user searches for the Japanese character, our app will display the corresponding search results. Each search result contains meanings, examples, and audio pronunciation.
Conclusion
We present a novel interface for a Japanese-English dictionary app. We designed our application to be simple and free of the clutter present in other dictionary apps. In addition, the 4 input modes (handwriting mode, audio mode, camera mode, and keyboard mode) allow new users to easily enter and search for new unfamiliar words.
