Black Box

Inspiration

We are motivated to give people enjoyable experiences through recorded audio. Many platforms provide the ability to interact with others using video or text, but the concept of anonymously conversing with others in a send-once receive-once format is unexplored. We also believe that the aggregation of submitted recordings provides an interesting opportunity to present this audio and information inferred from it in novel and compelling ways.

What it does

Black Box provides a few core features: 1) the ability to record and share an audio file, 2) the ability to receive a recording from someone else.

How I built it

Black Box is a web application built in Node/JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Audio is and retrieved using Amazon S3 buckets.

Challenges I ran into

Questions around the experience we are aiming to provide proved to be quite challenging. We ran into questions around content moderation, what types of data we should collect about the users, as well as the ideal way to present data back to users in a meaningful way. Technical challenges centered around the persistence of user-recorded audio in AWS.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Reef: I learned about web media APIs, and feel much more comfortable using them. Amina: Breaking down the visual to something simple and meaningful. Omar: Executing a simple but feasible way to change how people communicate is exciting.