Æ Voice

Advertiser Dashboard
Dashboard - Create ad UI
Dashboard - Deposit Fund
Landing Page
Audience App - Homepage
Audience App - Quick Walkthrough

Inspiration

The idea of Æ Voice was born is when I'm stuck in traffic jams, I'm talking to myself, getting bored and nothing to do, it's really waste of time. Let me share with you my experience in Malaysia, everyday I have to spend at least 2 hours to and from the work due to the traffic jam, and did you know that according to the world traffic statistic report, people of Malaysia spend 1 hour on average in heavy traffic jams every day and the Malaysia only ranks 73rd in the world traffic congestion rankings ! I can't imagine how much time people in the rank 1st country spend every day stuck in traffic.

In most of the country, it is illegal to playing with phone while driving or even get stuck in traffic, so the only thing I can do is listen to the radio and be in a daze. Then I found that I enjoyed engage with the radio host because it was the only fun thing I could do in the car and I realized not only me but most of my friends and family do the same.

So I wondering if it's possible to create something meaningful for those who are stuck in traffic every day, instead of wasting time but turn these time to contribute to the community and earn extra income.

Therefore I created Æ Voice.

What it does

Æ Voice is a new way of advertising that provides a transparent advertisement environment, connects advertisers with audiences on the blockchain, and effectively increases audience engagement. Audience can listen to ads and answer questions to earn AE rewards from anywhere at anytime with voice input, even stuck in traffic jams, exercising or doing any relaxation and time consuming activity.

Before I talk further about Æ Voice, I would like to highlight some of the problem statements that Æ Voice is trying to solve in the market today.

Traffic Jam : Like I mentioned above, most of the country has traffic jams issues and it's getting worse everywhere, in Malaysia, workers spend at least 44 hours a month in their cars due to traffic jams, and Malaysia is only 73rd in the world's traffic congestion rankings.
Pointless advertisement : There are so many ways to advertise on the market but most of it makes no sense because it just forces the audience to watch it but the audience is not trying to understand and engage with it. Like social media ads, most audience just want to skip it ASAP, basically the skip button is the only engagement.
Paid ads : There are some "Watch ads to get paid" concepts on the market, but there are few problems with these concepts. The only purpose audience watch these ads is to earn money, so they're not trying to understand and engage with the ads, so the quality of the ads is low. Additionally, most "paid ads" systems having the late payment or no payment issues based on user reviews.
Market need new advertising way : Most audiences are already "numb" to the way advertising is currently marketed. Therefore, the advertising industry needs to continuously improve and find new ways to advertise.
Blockchain market : Thanks to elevated instability among stablecoins, blockchain market seem quiet recently. Instead of constantly improving and develop blockchain infrastructure, exchanges, lending, staking, NFTs... the market needs something new that can really contribute to the community and to onboard more users join the blockchain market.

How it work

So how exactly Æ Voice work ? There will be 2 main system in Æ Voice which is audience app and advertiser dashboard. Here is the overview of the big idea :

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The main concept is to let advertisers deposit funds into smart contracts, set up ad content, upload audio file ( system will upload to IPFS ), and configure reward settings on the system. Audience can then listen to ad content and answer questions from anywhere at anytime through voice input to earn AE rewards.

The following is a list of Æ Voice command :

play : to start reading the ads content to the audience
repeat : to repeat reading the ads content
stop : pause the reading
next : next ads content
previous : previous ads content
A - F : to answer multiple choice question

Business Impact

The overall concept may be simple, but I believe it can have a huge impact on the market:

To audience : Turn wasted time to contribute to the community and earn extra income.
To advertiser : Better way to increase ad quality, audience engagement and spread brand awareness.
To aeternity : Get more end user onboard to aeternity and let more end users know about aeternity, how fast its transactions are and how low transaction fees are. Not only end users, but also advertisers (companies) will be involved in the aeternity community, and since most of the advertisers are big companies, I believed that the image of aeternity will spread to the market at an extremely fast speed.

Innovativeness

Currently on the market only have "Watch ads to get paid", but there seems to be no "listen ads and answer question to get paid". I believe Æ Voice will be a whole new way of advertising in the market as it has to be work with a low transaction fee and fast transaction blockchain like aeternity.

Revenue Model

Basically, it's free to start advertising on Æ Voice, there are no setup fees and no subscription fees. The main revenue stream comes from each engagement. The initial plan was cost of $0.01 per engagement, which refers to the current market average cost in the advertising industry. Advertising costs will be change based on market demand.

How I built it

Project Background

The smart contract is built using the Sophia and the AEStudio rapid prototyping tool . The frontend system is built using ReactJS, HTML and CSS. Both system are hosted on the Alibaba Cloud ECS server. The domain is register SSL certificate with Let's Encrypt.

Overall project planning is using Miro to illustrate the input, process flow and output.

Challenge I faced

The main challenge i faced is that I found this hackathon a week ago, and it was my first time developing a blockchain system also im quite new to react,it took me a quite a while to learn and study, ultimately not enough time to develop a complete system. But luckily the aeternity community is great, it's easy to understand and easy to achieve what I'm trying to build, i still managed to build an MVP to demostrate the project concept.

What's next

The current system is far from a complete production system. There is still a lot to improve :

Since the project is more of a startup idea, the business model, operation plan, revenue model and marketing plan need to be refined.
Currently the project only shows the main functions of the system, and there are many missing functions, such as advertiser verification, permission handling, security mechanism, advertiser dashboard insight, responsive, PWA, more flexible ads reward configuration, ads sentiment analysis, ads reporting and so on.
Fix the system logic, such as the answer must be encrypted, the audience app should not have a smart contract interface when answering the question, the user can only answer after the audio is over, and the user cannot answer the question again after they answered correctly, and so on.
Currently system is using WebSpeechAPI which is less accurate and needs better processing of speech input.
Improve security especially preventing bots from answering questions.
Improve overall user interface design and user experience
Code optimization