Episode Details

Taliyah Huang is the creator of Bobaway, an online translator that converts English text into a Taiwanese audio clip. She is a sophomore studying biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University. After months away at college Taliyah felt her Taiwanese was out of practice so she created Bobaway to get better at Taiwanese and converse fluently with her grandparents. In June she posted a YouTube video about how she created it. A lot has happened since then. She's been interviewed by TaiwaneseAmerican.org and listed on the Taiwanese American Archives. Many generous donors have allowed her to continue running Bobaway and she's purchased a domain for it so now you can use Bobaway at Bobaway.org.

Related Links: https://talkingtaiwan.com/taliyah-huang-young-inventor-of-bobaway-online-translator-that-converts-english-to-taiwanese-ep-253/

She's continuing to work on improvements and additional features for BobaWay, but at much slower pace now that she's busy with school. If you want to support her development of Bobaway visit her website ww.taliyahhuang.com.

Here's a little preview of what we talked about in this podcast episode:

· What motivated Taliyah to create Bobaway

· How Taliyah got interested in technology

· Taliyah's first invention was a contraption to clean her flute

· How Taliyah presented her first invention to US Vice President Mike Pence

· Taliyah's background and upbringing

· Taliyah's relationship with her grandparents

· Taliyah's favorite phrases in Taiwanese

· How Taliyah learned to program and code

· What Taliyah enjoys most about being an engineer

· How Taliyah installed 100 different libraries and made 17 attempts to create Bobaway

· How long it took Taliyah to create Bobaway

· Why Taliyah decided to make and post a YouTube video showing how she created Bobaway

· How Taliyah wants to inspire other young women to be interested in technology and engineering

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