SONAR

SONAR: The Digital Sentinel. A Gemini-driven agentic platform for real-time Arcom compliance and democratic protection in the Pacific.

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📡 SONAR - Agentic Broadcast Intelligence

💡 Inspiration

The regulatory landscape for media in New Caledonia is unique and complex. Currently, monitoring political pluralism, advertising quotas, and digital safety is a manual, slow, and expensive process for institutions like ARCOM.

The inspiration behind SONAR was to democratize these tools—making high-level media oversight accessible through Generative AI (Gemini 3.0 Flash) to protect democratic balance and citizen rights across the Pacific region.

🚀 What it does

SONAR is an "Agentic" media intelligence ecosystem. It listens to radio streams and analyzes TV broadcasts in real-time to:

  • 🗳️ Political Pluralism Audit: Automatically detects speakers and calculates airtime for political figures.
  • 📺 Advertising Monitor: Identifies ad breaks and verifies compliance with hourly quotas.
  • 🛡️ Digital Safety: Detects sensitive content or regulatory breaches instantly.
  • ☁️ Cloud Sync: Centralizes data from local "Edge Nodes" into a public-facing transparency dashboard.

🛠️ How we built it

We engineered a robust "Edge-to-Cloud" hybrid architecture:

  • Edge Nodes: Local Python & Node.js scripts (SonarAudio & SonarVideo) handling media capture and heavy processing via the Gemini API.
  • Control Center: A professional Desktop application built with Electron & Vite (SonarDesktop) for human oversight and steering.
  • Cloud Dashboard: An Express.js gateway deployed on Vercel that serves live results to the public and regulators.
  • Intelligence: Gemini 1.5/2.0/3.0 Flash models for ultra-fast, cost-effective multimodal analysis.

🧱 Challenges we ran into

Our biggest hurdle was the "Local vs. Cloud" dilemma. Media streams are bandwidth-heavy, and processing them entirely in the cloud is cost-prohibitive.

We solved this by building local processing nodes that only transmit "intelligence" (lightweight JSON data) to the cloud. We also automated frontend template generation to ensure complex AI outputs remain readable and actionable for non-technical users.

🏆 Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of building a complete ecosystem, not just a simple prototype.

Seeing a local radio stream being transcribed, analyzed for political bias by Gemini, and pushed to a live Vercel dashboard in seconds was our "Eureka" moment. We successfully created a professional-grade UI with SonarDesktop that feels like a "production-ready" tool for authorities.

📚 What we learned

We discovered the true power of Agentic Workflows. AI isn't just for answering questions—it's for building systems that know how to audit, how to report, and how to structure data for human decision-making. We also mastered the deployment of hybrid applications bridging local hardware with cloud scalability.

⏩ What's next for SONAR

  • 🔔 Real-time Alerts: SMS/Email notifications for immediate compliance breaches.
  • 🔎 Archival Search: A "Google for Media" to search months of broadcasts in natural language.
  • 🖥️ SonarDesktop for Media: Providing a "Pro version" for broadcasters to run their own audits and ensure they meet regulatory standards before airtime. (Contact for access)
  • 🌏 Regional Scaling: Deploying across Pacific territories to create a safety net for media integrity.

📜 Certifications & Expertise

  • Google Analytics Certification (Issued by Skillshop / Google)

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