NotePod

Helping make your podcast experience more memorable and streamlined!

Comment

Inspiration

We all love listening to podcasts about a wide range of topics, but we found that often remembering key information can be very difficult. Thus we created NotePod to help others like us to take synced notes alongside our favorite podcasts to help us remember key details.

What it does

NotePod notifies users on their mobile devices when they start listening to a podcast and allows them to take notes about the podcast while it plays in the background. The users can look at their previously listened to podcasts and write more notes as they come to them. There is a community feature that allows users to upvote and downvote other users' notes to help others learn more through podcasts. Lastly, we added Amazon Alexa support to allow users to take voice notes which are converted to text and stored within their notes for their most recent podcast.

Business Viability

We worked extremely hard to make a fully functional product that’s ready to ship. We would employ a free tier to make the product accessible to all, and a premium tier for $14/month to give people who love the product even more. We also see the podcast market growing rapidly and want to capitalize by solving a prominent and sizeable problem.

How we built it

We wanted to challenge ourselves by attempting the make a mobile app for the first time thus we used Expo for our front-end UI. We used Google Firebase for the backend of our application and hosting. We used Spotify's API to connect our application to the users' playback history to allow them to take notes of their current and previously listened podcasts. We also incorporated Voiceflow to integrate a conversation flow that can be connected to using an Amazon Alexa. Try the app with Expo Go! https://expo.dev/@toby.sch/notepod-app

Challenges we ran into

Learning Expo for the first time was very tough as it was completely new territory for everyone on the team. Additionally, we faced some issues with connecting all of our systems together to finish our project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are all very proud of the final project as there were points during the event where failure seemed inevitable. The fact that we were to implement almost everything that we had planned is very fulfilling and made this Hackathon a great experience.

What we learned

We learned how difficult it can be to integrate many different technologies into our implementation in a time-restricted environment. We used a number of technologies that we virtually had no experience using, and we were forced to learn how to use them on the fly.

What's next for NotePod

Hopefully, we can continue to work on the NotePod app and refine some of our features to deploy it for all users. We believe that NotePod could be an excellent candiate to approach the "freemium" business model where we could release a pro version of the application to allow for more features in-depth features that would be developed by our team rather than using the aid of the Spotify API calls.

Share this project:

Updates