One year after the market introduction of Circuit and only 9 months after the launch of the collaborative PaaS APIs and programming models, our #CircuitHack program is really gaining traction and delivering value to our development process.
Hackathons are basically quick coding exercises for developers combined with an open competition around most impressive extensions of the Circuit product or extension of other products with the Circuit capabilities. The format is very popular with younger developers and offers a speedy learning curve of APIs supported by a senior mentor on site. As in real marathons, people support each other with water, food and motivation, and knowledge, but at the end, there’s one winner (team) that convinced a jury after 24 to 48 hours of intense rapid software development.
These hackathons do not only spread the word of Circuit’s great APIs, they are also a significant source of feedback to our architects working on the further improvements of the APIs. Already today, some of the enterprise integration scenarios used in large scale Circuit deployments such as Siemens, are built on Circuit APIs, available to the Unify ecosystem via http://developers.circuit.com .
We’ve recently supported two interesting hackathons, one in Brno, Czech Republic, and one in Paris, France. In my first post, I will cover Brno and in later this week, I’ll post about Paris.
Three teams working with Circuit APIs at the TADHack in Paris in December, next to other tables mentored by other vendors in the WebRTC and collaboration space.
Ixperta, Brno, Czech Republic
The hackathon in Brno was hosted by Ixperta, a long time development partner of Unify in the PBX area. Actually, none of five teams of Ixperta’s developers had any previous involvement or experience with Circuit. For some it was even the first experience with Node.js, which is used in many cases around Circuit. The activity qualifies Ixperta very well for Unify customers looking for help with Circuit implementation and integration projects. Here are the five projects presented after one and a half days of intense hacking:
Team Catapult – IoT and Circuit
The team showed impressive knowledge around iBeacons and distributed smart devices. They deployed a couple of Raspberry Devices distributed in a building and tracking iBeacons attached to a person. A Circuit conversation was interacting with a robot answering questions of the location of people and showed even an real-time map.
The team had a lot of fun and did a great presentation with a story around the “Lord of the Rings”.
In the business context, Unify offers already the tracing of assets for example in hospitals outside Circuit. The hack illustrated a great way of merging this important use case with the Circuit experience.
Team Yoda – Meeting Bot
The team wanted to bring an action, task, and topic structure to unstructured verbal or textual conversation in Circuit. Adding a lot of additional UI elements, for example buttons, which turn a post into an action item, clearly went beyond the current flexibility to customize the Circuit web application. The team took some example code available on developers.circuit.com, which uses the Polymer framework and turns the Javascript APIs basically into new HTML tags. See more details here and here (registration required).
This approach basically creates an alternative web frontend to Circuit, which was totally open to any changes they liked to do. The example shows that a post in the chat flow could be assigned as a task to person etc.
Finally the hack showed an automatic generation of meeting notes summarizing all topics, actions by person, and open problems. Once Circuit introduces a more open UI extensibility concept in 2016, you can imagine to have a commercial Circuit extension adding exactly this to the Circuit UI.
Team RoBot – IRC commands
The robot technology was very prominent in this hackathon. Robots can listen to textual and (soon) to media flows of the Circuit conversation. That’s why external developers can weave commands into the plain textual conversation. The team RoBot did exactly this to give people, familiar with traditional IRC chat commands, similar functionality in Circuit. This included also the management of absence from the computer or the final chat report automatically wrapped into a PDF file.
Team GamifyCircuit – Gamification
Many enterprise tools are just boring and not really fun to use. Social enterprise collaboration lives from the balance of sharing own information and leveraging other people’s posts. This team implemented a set of motivation and incentive functionalities on top of the Circuit user experience. This can start with a little congratulation message based on the level of the user’s activity – up to sophisticated rules motivating the right activities like in advanced consumer games. The Circuit development team at Unify observes these ideas carefully for the future journey of Circuit.
Team NoBarriers – Voice2Text, Real-Time Translation, and Transcription
This team was the winner of the Hackathon at Ixperta in the Czech Republic. NoBarriers had not only a bunch of great ideas, they realized almost all of them, even in the short period of roughly two days development time. In some cases the Circuit APIs had shortcomings and could not support their ideas. However, the NoBarriers team did not stop and found work ’arounds. The result was a sum of multiple hacks orchestrated into one amazing user story around meetings of people speaking different languages. It extends the original idea of Circuit merging the voice/video communication and the persistent textual/document collaboration into one cloud service:
Imagine a conference call with multiple participants, all talking in their native language. You have no chance to follow the conversation. However, the NoBarriers team demonstrated a built-in speech-to-text and text-to-text translation functionality. One member of the team spoke English, one Czech, one Hebrew, and one Russian. Inside the Circuit conversation, the speech-to-text showed up for a second to give the speaker a chance to validate the result, then, automatically all languages got translated into a flow of english text conversations. Please note, that the above screenshot is not a text chat, it is the real-time dynamic result of an fluent voice conference call!
Although the actual translation and speech2text services are mashed-up from other cloud services (google in this case), the integration and result – fully embedded in Circuit – blew the jury away.
As all Circuit users know, Circuit can record audio/video sessions and store it in the conversation context together with other documents. The NoBarriers team even created a new recording representation, where the audio stream is in sync with the translated transcription. You can easily scroll longer transcripts and directly re-listen to the original native language audio if you question the result of the automatic recognition and translation. For auditing purposes this document could even be downloaded to an external file system as a plain folder of an HTML file and the audio mp3 snippets.
The Jury congratulated all teams for their amazing engagement and results, and especially the NoBarriers team for their outstanding creativity and achievement.
See the storify stream with impressions of the Hackathon event.
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