We shipped a cool feature in a custom mobile app this week!

We’re Code Workshop, we developed a custom mobile app for our client in Sydney.

We built a super small minimum-viable-product for a client to demo this week.

The projected consisted of a web application built with Laravel 5.3 to administer the database side of the project, with secure client authentication and data management.

It felt a bit ‘kitchen sink’ to use a full featured framework for a small data back-end that won’t be used in production forever, but using proper tools means we know:

• It’s secure out of the box
• It won’t need to be thrown out if the client wants to expand the product
• It looks the part, using the nice default themes

Being an MVP, the client had a tight budget and a tight timeline. We ship enough Laravel code to get this one turned around pretty quick.

The second part (the only part, if you’re the user) is a simple custom mobile app with some super simple functionality.

• The user will speak a phrase to the app – maybe a question or a simple statement
• The app will look up the phrase in a list of pre-determined phrases, and speak a pre-determined response.

10 years ago, this would’ve been a super difficult project, and the result would’ve been crap. Especially with our ‘Strayan accents (ever use those “Dragon Naturally Speaking” products back in the day? Everyone tried them once..)

Android and iOS make native speech recognition API’s available to the app for minimum effort now, and text-to-speech is just as good.

We highly recommend

Speech Recognition Plugin (https://github.com/macdonst/SpeechRecognitionPlugin)

and

Cordova Text to Speech (https://github.com/vilic/cordova-plugin-tts)

which both interfaced with native libraries to help us ship a high quality MVP for this client in record time (they’ll be off to their demo now!)

We offer Phonegap to our clients who request a custom mobile app as part of larger projects we take on. This will sometimes involve a field data collection app for sales staff (integrate with CRM package etc), data collection for staff (maintenance records, inventory management, record keeping), a sales and promotion tool, or some variation of the above.