It’s not as bad as it sounds.
Challenge
It takes more than 1 minute to write a blog post (not to mention that introverts need to prepare their brain to spaz out with the extros running around everywhere).
Solution
You receive a phone call. A friendly robot asks you an open ended question:
- What’s been on your mind today?
- What did you dream about?
- Describe the mood in your city lately.
- etc
Your 1 minute answer is transcribed and published to your blog.
[… transcription would live here …]
I like the idea of posting the audio as well as the text. I did some genealogy work recently and it occurred to me how much I would love to hear the voices of long-gone relatives. It would give such interesting insight into their personality and temperament.
So I wrote a simple application as a proof of concept.
Application structure
Actors:
- The interstitial app hosted on heroku (app)
- Jekyll blog hosted on github pages (blog)
- Twilio (twilio)
Under the hood:
- The app wakes up and tells twilio to call you with a question.
- Twilio records the answer and hits the callback endpoint on the app
- The app grabs the recording and transcript of the call
- The app creates a jekyll-formatted post and commits it to the blog repo
- The app deploys the blog changes to github pages and “hello world”
I’ve put together a proof of concept and will be posting the resulting interrogations here. Please feel free to run with the project on github. Contributions welcome.
