
Show HN: A sound-effect chatroom for meeting engagement - clusmore
https://soundroom.azurewebsites.net/#hn
======
clusmore
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](https://github.com/CurtisLusmore/soundroom)

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

~~~
clusmore
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.

------
gojomo
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!

~~~
clusmore
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.

------
ly
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`.

~~~
clusmore
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 🧏).

------
montroser
This is fun!

At work we moved from zoom to [https://team.video](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.

~~~
clusmore
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.

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

[https://youtu.be/YP5-lgFaCBg?t=19](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](https://youtu.be/Sm6eZ9V9RbM?t=124)

------
all2
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.

~~~
clusmore
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/](https://meeting-companion.azurewebsites.net/)

