WriteRoom

Inspiration

I have been the organizer and manager of ten-years-old, 1,650+ member, but now-defunct meetup.com group "Toronto Scriptwriters Meetup Group". I have been recording and transcribing collaborative writing group sessions over this time, always hoping that someone else would come up with a better way to differentiate the many voices speaking, often concurrently.

What it does

The web-based application will transcribe a group discussion and format the (text) content into a professional film or television draft script format.

How we built it

It's been a simple WebRTC application that has always relied on a partner API for transcription. Script formatting is performed with a simple set of console-based text-processing functions.

Challenges we ran into

Building it was fairly straightforward, but finding an effective API tool to manage the transcriptions has proven to be problematic. Most solutions are overburdened by simple roadblocks such as concurrency, accents, and even training.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I've attended some of the biggest hackathons in North America over the past ten years, and while I have claimed very few prizes, I've made many friendships that endure.