Inspiration
There are roughly 1.25 million children in the U.S. with an active-duty military parent. When deployed, military schedules are notoriously unreliable, making Skype plans difficult to keep. Cell phone usage is limited depending on a soldier's location, and the feeling of a missed call from a far-away parent or spouse is something no one should experience.
What it does
StoryTeller is simple: users record and upload an audio file on our website. Once the file is uploaded, we issue the user a phone number with an extension to retrieve the message. Then the user can share the number and extension to a loved one who can listen to the message at their convenience.
The audio file can contain anything: a bed-time story to a child, an "I love you" to a spouse, or a joke to a friend.
By sharing messages this way, there are no hard feelings from a missed call, and there's no way the message can be accidentally deleted from voicemail. Much like reading a letter, there's a positive feeling from the surprise of hearing the message for the first time.
How we built it
We built our app using Javascript, Python, Flask, Azure, and Twilio.
Challenges we ran into
In the beginning, we ran into a lot of trouble deploying our app with cloud services like AWS or Azure. As a result, we had to pivot and develop everything locally.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud of learning the Twilio API overnight.
What we learned
We learned a great deal about Flask and Javascript--much more than we had originally anticipated.
What's next
Ideally, we'd like to deploy StoryTeller to Azure or AWS so that it can be used in the field (localhost isn't ideal for a far-reaching technology, after all). After that, we'll start building up the front-end and adding new features as necessary!
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