Show HN: A sound-effect chatroom for meeting engagement | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A sound-effect chatroom for meeting engagement

soundroom.azurewebsites.net

27 pointsclusmore13 comments

Hey HN. I was playing around with SignalR and built this webapp that lets you create and join chatrooms and send sound effects to each other. I've used this in mid-large meetings where you don't want people coming off mute all the time just to laugh or answer questions, etc. Hope you find it useful.

Source code available[1], and I wrote a blog post[2] which steps through the process of building a simplified version of it if you want to build and run your own.

[1]: https://github.com/CurtisLusmore/soundroom

[2]: https://lusmo.re/posts/meeting-companion

Thanks everybody for checking this out. I gotta say it's pretty wild sitting in the room all day and hearing people come in and out, communicating with you only via a handful of sound effects. Not quite what the app was built for but even this is pretty fun.

EDIT: Aaaand we exceeded my free tier! I've bumped it up to the next tier for now.

EDIT: Thanks to whoever sent hundreds of party horn noises non-stop for 5 minutes, you've made me consider putting throttling in.

Lots of fun!

Could be interesting to let 'rooms' upload their own new sounds, for a dynamically expanding, community-specific audio reactions.

Also, to make each button have alternate 'just for me' or 'for everyone' options – so you can learn what an icon does, without triggering it for everyone. (The button motions/activations that accompany each activation could also be different, in animation or coloring, based on whether they've been triggered remotely or by the current user.)

Thanks!

Thanks. :) Custom sounds is definitely on my list, but at the moment this is surprisingly simple and all running on free-tier Azure stuff. I'm still thinking about the simplest way to allow not only hosting of uploaded sound effects but storing custom layouts.

In the meantime, feel free to clone the repo or build your own from scratch by following the blog post I linked in my other comment. As I said it's surprisingly simple and you can run it for free.

The "For Me Only" mode would definitely help not only first-timers, but everybody listening to first-timers mashing the buttons. I guess you can always just open a different room and try it out but a dedicated mode would be handy too.

Just wanted to let you know there's no sound in Safari as the user has never given permission to play audio. So every time you run `audio.current.play();` it gets rejected with a `NotAllowedError`.

Indeed - failed when I tried in MobileSafari/iOS, worked great from Brave/MacOS.

Awesome, thanks for letting me know. I've raised an issue in GitHub and I'll take a look.

Edit: I just pushed a change which hopefully addresses this, which unfortunately temporarily boots everybody from the room. Still a problem with the 2 emoji which don't display on MacOS or iOS (yawn and deaf 🧏).

This is fun!

At work we moved from zoom to https://team.video, which has emoji reactions with sound effects that are ... a little bit more "grown up", if I can say it that way.

We actually really use them all the time. What's great is that especially in bigger groups, it's so much easier to read the room when you can see everyone's reactions. Without this, when people are quiet, you never know whether it's because they're not engaged or they're being polite, or they don't want to find the exact moment to unmute and interject verbally.

I can't imagine going back to zoom/hangouts now.

Oh awesome, I'll have to take a look at this. Thanks for sharing. I certainly have noticed when you lose all in-person meetings you start to notice the quiet in meetings more, people are reluctant to unmute just so you can hear them laugh or make reassuring noises like yes and uh-huh. I think sound effects can make a big difference.

I need this one for design review meetings... "what does everyone think about using ___ here?"

https://youtu.be/YP5-lgFaCBg?t=19

And one of my favorite radio calls of all time, "he's got blockers!"

https://youtu.be/Sm6eZ9V9RbM?t=124

I hoped for a "wha-pssshhhh" noise (like a super fake slap). I was disappointed. I would also settle for "TROLOLO!" or "START THE GAME ALREADY!"

I am curious to see this actually used. If I were a presenter I would not use something like this (distracting, potentially irritating). As a viewer, I'm ok with a Discord/other chatroom running separate from the meeting. Questions from the separate room tend to percolate up to the main meeting room if no one knows the answer.

My experience with medium/large presentations is all college lecture, so take the above with a grain of salt.

"START THE GAME ALREADY!"

Oof. The Flood of memories was strong.

Yeah I definitely know what you mean. I've found this works well for meetings with your team or people you work really closely with, especially once the initial novelty of just mashing all the sound effects wears off. There's a cut-down version with just 6 core sounds (clap, yes, no, can't see, can't hear, check the chat) that might be more palatable: https://meeting-companion.azurewebsites.net/

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