R&D Phase
Being an avid cyclist, often ideas and thoughts come to the client while on his bike, maybe something related to a project, or he discovers new fun routes or discovers a fun place that he would like to visit later. He wanted to make a voice note about this to process later, so he could optimize his cycling routes based on these notes. So the key concept, as the name suggests, was linking voice notes with GPS locations.
After exploring various design ideas and refining the initial offering together with the client, we started looking into the technical solutions. Initially we liked the idea of having a custom wake word, and played around with technologies like porcupine and spokestack - which seemed very promising, but because of expensive pricing models that would kick in when growing the app, we decided to take another route.
Since most modern phones are equipped with voice assistants such as Siri and Google Assistant, we decided that practically it would be a better idea to hook into those systems. The downside would be that we couldn't use a custom wake word, but the upside would be better performance.