Inspiration
We hack things and build products all the time. We also like getting feedback on our products and "getting out of the building," but it's hard to find people in the target demographic. A lot of times we don't get the same feedback from friends and family, so we go to Starbucks or grab people off the street and ask them questions about our value proposition. Why, with the internet being available almost everywhere all the time, do we need to find people on the street? We should be able to speak with someone in our target demographic at any time.
What it does
We partner with publishers to create a real-time channel for inviting web surfers to live user research sessions. What this means is, a researcher requests us for a participant of a particular demographic, for example Bank of America is interested in getting feedback from mothers with a certain income level or amount in savings. We leverage our network of publishers, in this case blogs and magazines that cater to that demographic, to show an invitation to the study on publisher websites and allow participants to join almost instantly.
How we built it
We use nodejs for being able to concurrently show invitations to many potential participants. We use webrtc for realtime screen sharing and web cam conference. Twilio allows us to make calls from the browser into conference lines, once a participant is found. Cisco helps us alert team members that a conversation is taking place. Watson converts the text to speech and updates the chat room for this conversation with live information.
Challenges we ran into
Mostly technical challenges which we overcame to a good extent. Lack of time.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are taking a live call, transcribing it with watson in real time and posting the notes into a chat room for entire teams to be part of the conversation. We're pretty excited!
Assaf sliced outgoing stream from client side mic (created by twilio) and sent a copy to our node server. Piped this stream to watson for speech to text which was posted to relevent Spark channals.
What we learned
We believe there is a market for this product. Folks have asked to use our product once we're live.
What's next for Rapid Feedback Club
IPO! Well, maybe take a lean approach and test out the market, at least.
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