WordCoach: Turning a Photo of a Textbook Into a Vocabulary Deck
Instead of copying new words out of a workbook by hand, snap one photo — and get a word bank with example sentences, audio, and tests.
Watching my kid study English, some days more time goes into organizing the words than into memorizing them. New words show up in a textbook or workbook, get copied into a notebook, looked up, annotated — and only then does the actual memorizing start. When the prep is tedious, the memorizing gets postponed. So I built an app that shrinks the prep down to a single photo.
The camera replaces the notebook
Scan a textbook or workbook page with the camera and it reads the text (OCR). It pulls out the words worth learning and saves them into a word bank, organized by date and set. The words from today's workbook become today's set to memorize, in one motion.
A bare word doesn't stick, so the app generates an example sentence for each one. Words seem to find their place only when you meet them inside a sentence. For pronunciation, you can choose between US, UK, and AU accents. It sounds like a small thing, but it came from watching my kid get thrown by the gap between exam listening audio and the accents on YouTube.
The test is what tells you
Review happens through random tests. Right and wrong answers are recorded, and missed words come back around. The records show, honestly, the distance between feeling like you've memorized a word and actually being able to produce it.
Where it stands
It's built as an iOS app I run on our own devices, and it's in use at home. A proper release is still an open question. Like the other apps in this lab, it solved our house's problem first — and now I'm standing back and deciding how far to open it up.