#HarmaNinja ##A web app to let you command your music.
We were tremendously inspired by science fiction movies, Iron Man in particular. The ability to flawlessly communicate with computers so that they can do menial tasks for us was excellent motivation. We wanted to enable everyone to feel the power and authority that comes with commanding computers to do your will.
HarmaNinja (pronounced "Harman Ninja") is a website that allows you stream music by simply opening your mouth. When you open it, it displays a prompt, at which time you can tell it to play a song by name or by name and artist. Be sure to grant the site permissions to interface with your microphone. Harman Everest Elite 700's are recommend for an optimal audio experience.
We built HarmaNinja with quite a few technologies. We combined several web frameworks and API's together to create the site. These were Javascript, HTML5/CSS, Apache Server, annyang (a speech-to-text engine), and Spotify's Web API. We collaborated on the site design and coding by hosting the code on Cloud9, which allowed us to all edit the code in real-time.
We initially attempted to create HarmaNinja for Android using the Harman Developer API. However, this proved to be extremely difficult, as two-thirds of the members had a plethora of problems with Android Studio. We ended up wasting about 3 hours on Android Studio, to no avail, before we decided to switch to web frameworks.
We also ran into some trouble with the Spotify API, as music would not stream until a certain id was added to our HTML dividers. Furthermore, the annyang speech-to-text engine had very little documentation, so we spent a lot of time doing trial-and-error until we finally figured out how to get it to work.
We are very proud of creating our first "smart" app that integrates voice recognition with a common aspect of life, music. We also feel accomplished due to the fact that we managed to figure out at least one API, the Spotify one. This was Jacob's first time using an API and my second time using an API ever.
We learned the importance of preparation, as we did not prepare Android Studio before coming here. We also learned how to create a web application from start to finish, using many different frameworks along the way. And, of course, that modern technology truly works wonders.
If time permits, we would like to make the app fully functional, as currently it only plays demos from Spotify. WE would also like to expand HarmaNinja onto mobile devices, possibility creating our original idea, which was using the Harman Developer to create an Android app.
##Try It Out go to: www.harmaninja.tech