Kill Switch

Voice recognition to turn your microphone and camera off in case you indicate you want to, but forget to do so. It also notifies you by sending you a text message to remind you.

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Inspiration

The entire world is using video conference apps such as Google Meet, Zoom, Google Hangouts, and Microsoft Teams like never before. The last thing you want is a mistake like what Daniel made to happen to you.

It is easy to forget to turn off your webcam and/or mic when taking a break and it can sometimes lead to embarrassing moments. From this inspiration, we wanted to come up with a solution that automates the process of turning off your webcam and mic, but also reminds you to do so as well.

What it does

Harnessing the power of virtual assistants and AI, we developed a program to recognize phrases or sentences that indicate you are taking a break from your virtual meeting, implying that you would like to turn off your camera or microphone.

Phrases such as "I'm gonna be right back" or "I'm going to the bathroom" will trigger the voice assistant to recognize that as an indicator that you could use some help with automating your next steps. We send you an SMS message to remind you to turn your camera and mic off. In case you don't, we turn it off for you :)

How we built it

Implementing the solution through a virtual assistant, we made the setup easy for our users. All they need to do is sign into their account, which will have our program uploaded and ready to use.

We used the Voiceflow API to program a Google Home app to recognize phrases or sentences indicating you would like to take a break from your virtual meeting. To deploy the backend, we went ahead with cloud functions on the Google Cloud Platform. The cloud function uses the Vonage API to send SMS messages to your phone and provides an interface to turn off your webcam and microphone through Chrome Scripts.

Challenges we ran into

Working with cloud functions was foreign to all of the members of our team. It was great looking into them and using them in our application to accelerate our development process and focus on our idea.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

  • Getting the Google Home app up and running
  • Being able to Voiceflow to recognize key phrases and use GCP to setup cloud functions
  • Being able to programmatically turn off camera/mic and send an sms

What's next for Kill Switch

  • Extend to a variety of platforms (right now this only works on google meets)
  • Extend to more phrases/NLP

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