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Sulaiman Sudirman
Sulaiman Sudirman

Posted on • Edited on

TwilioHackathon - Crowdsourcing Emotional Support Helpline

Idea

Amid the current pandemic outbreak, peoples are forced to stay home to break the chain of transmission. But there are some unfortunate people who don't have anyone at their home to rely for help or emotional support. And also there are some who have limited or no access to the internet at their home like in New Zealand.

What we built

Think a call center system, but outsourced to and answered by anyone that registered online. Anyone who need someone to talk to will ring a hotline number, the person will be put on queue and wait. The system will ring everyone who are registered and set their status as available online. The first person who pick up will automatically connect to the caller.

Demo

Give a call to +18557725566 to chat with someone,

OR become that someone who will be ready to receive a call by registering your number at https://chinwag.xyz

Currently only New Zealand, Malaysia & USA phone number are supported for this demo.

Link to Code

https://github.com/natsu90/chinwag-twilio

How we built it

  • NodeJS as the backend
  • Firebase Cloud Firestore as the database
  • Firebase Authentication, at the beginning we're using Twilio SMS API, but we realised it cost you money, in addition of the Voice API.
  • Twilio Voice API

Additional Resources/Info

If you're just started using Twilio, they have this setting called Geographic Permissions to protect from abuse. You have to toggle on the setting yourself for any country you think your user will come from. But this setting is not obviously displayed, so I had been pulling my hair for a few hours. But I'm partly to blame because I don't put a catch block in the code.😬

just one of our Hacking & Hustling sessions

Online Meeting

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