What set it in motion

This project was born during a series of meetings. During these meetings, people continuously kept referring to meaningless terminology. One word specifically kept creeping into the discussions: "high-over". Whatever it was they were looking for, it definitely needed a high-over version of it. Nobody could clarify exactly what it was about.

That night, I wrote a first version of software that used the Web Speech API to listen for a configurable list of buzzwords. Once all the words were mentioned in the room, the web app would start yelling "BINGO".

Putting it to the test

During the next day, we ran it during the meeting. We made sure the sound was switched off, so when during that meeting we hit the jackpot with all the buzzwords that were mentioned, and the screen started flickering, we knew the software was running according to spec.

What made this interesting

The whole thing was actually remarkably simple. I don't think many people were aware of the presence of the WebSpeech API in the browser. The entire application was client side, with the exception of a component that ran server side to generate an image of all of the buzzwords to include as an OGNL image, generating pretty previews when posting on the socials.