RandomTADHack (2015-date)

LightSign

Steven Goodwin, Lily Madar

A digital light scroll display, updated using a secure Stacuity Edge network. Messages are controlled solely by the owners of the board. Powered by Raspberry Pi and Stacuity webhooks. This could see future fleet management for multiple display or accessibility features such as STT or TTS translated to or from the display.

2nd place: Stacuity Winners

Secret Babble

Steven Goodwin, Lily Madar

Secret Babble helps making multilingual conversations more accessible by providing translations over the phone which can be read out loud by the system or sent discreetly as text message only, providing a transcription of the exchange.

2nd place: Global prize

Wizard Chess

Steven Goodwin, Lily Madar

Play chess with your voice, making it accessible for those with visual impairments or less able motor skills. The code is a basic Node app, running on a server which starts by making a Telnyx call to the conference room, which symbl.ai then joins. From there, anything said into the phone is processed by symbl.ai and passed via websockets to the web page. Computer moves are relayed by voice in the opposite direction to only the human player. (In earlier drafts the voice spoke to everyone, including symbl.ai, but since the moves the computer spoke were invalid for the human, nothing bad happened!)

This has the advantage over the browser's in-built speech recognition code, since the algebraic notation is parsed more intelligently here. (Only C4 confused it, as it was called SeaFood!)

We had intended to use sentiment analysis to vary the game AI, depending on how the player responded with their words, but we ran out of time.

Winner: London prize

Winner: Global prize

Podcast Annotator

Steven Goodwin, Lily Madar

Hands-free note-taking while listening to a podcast stream.

You first start a podcast from the webpage, which initiates a call to your phone. (But it could also be triggered by DTMF tones.) At this point you can listen to the podcast, and say things like "Good point" and "must look that up". These phrases are transcribed and added to a timeline for later review. Once the podcast ends, this review is sent via SMS.

This needs tender care, because the podcast audio can bleed into the microphone, causing the podcast itself to be transcribed instead of your annotations.Luckily, we found a way of sending the speech to only the necessary participants.

Winner: Global prize

Colloquia11y

Steven Goodwin, Lily Madar

Accessible conferencing solution (using TTS and STT)

It makes the conference available to all by allowing some users to interact via text message (both to "hear" the chat, and respond) while others get the audio experience.

One major piece of work was connecting a UK Telnyx number, with the symbl.ai conference, since only US numbers are currently supported. We solved this by buying two numbers, and connecting both to the same conference. (This means, as UK folk, we're only paying for a UK phone bill!)

We can improve the text component by including translations for specific participants, or expanding acronyms.

Winner: Global prize

Spotify On Hold

Steven Goodwin, Lily Madar

It plays customised hold music, as determined by the user's phone number. Our Avaya voice number pretends to be a supplier call centre. But instead of supplying a static XML with 'bland music.mp3', we have a dynamic endpoint that cross references the users phone number and their Spotify account, to dynamically provide their own music. This makes them less frustrated about needing to wait. Once an agent is available we use the API to interrupt the call, and dial the agent directly.

Runner-up: London prize

One Stop Shop

Steven Goodwin, Lily Madar

Everyone has a phone, but not everyone has the same app or cumbersome web page login. So, by combining Avaya and DialogFlow, we can use speech recognition to aggregate the shopping requirements from multiple people in the same house. Then, when the designated shopper leaves the house, they tap the appropriate NFC tag by the door which immediately reminds them (via voice) to take their mask, and sends SMS to everyone else that the shopping trip has begun. This outgoing communication is handled by Simwood. Everyone then has time to add new items, before the shopper arrives at the shop and they receive the complete shopping list via SMS.

Who Calls Me?

Steven Goodwin, Lily Madar

Inbound call reputation scoring and steering. It looks at the number, and dynamically reprograms the call routing to either busy, or the correct number.

WINNER: Simwood global prize

Simwood Node Library

Steven Goodwin, Lily Madar

Wrapping the Simwood API in a node Library. This was used in around 10 hacks from around the world, and so proved its real-world value within the first day!

WINNER: Simwood London prize

Fighting Fantasy

Steven Goodwin

Interactive fiction by SMS. I re-built a 'Fighting Fantasy' book using an SMS API, allowing people to read and play in an original and unique manner.

WINNER: Telesign global prize

Apifonica Node.js

Steven Goodwin, Lily Madar

A node library to make accessing APIfonica easy. This was used in our second entry, Rome.

WINNER: Apifonica global prize

Rome - Reach Me Anywhere

Steven Goodwin, Lily Madar

A way of contacting someone, in a variety of ways, depending on the time of day. This connected also to Slack, email, and SMS.

WINNER: Apifonica global prize

Vodka

Steven Goodwin

Overcome the hassle of testing Tropo with a local debugging tool.

WINNER: Berlin prize

Backup Call

Steven Goodwin, Lily Madar

Access your emergency contacts from any phone. A cloud-based IVR, with connections into Google calendar, and other online services.

WINNER: Cisco Spark / Tropo Global prize

Note to Selves

Steven Goodwin, Rianne Goijarts

A WebRTC based to do list, where you could phone in your 'todo' item, and the sevice would remember it, along with your geo-location, for later reference.

WINNER: Acision prize

WINNER: ApiDaze prize