I walked in the 2015 TADHack-mini London hackathon with the only goal in mind to create something using a Voxbone (the company I work for) product and Telestax’s Restcomm AMI (Amazon Machine Image). I ended up winning a prize and became a “rockstar” for a day, all thanks to these two flexible technologies I used for this hack and the amazing organization of the event.

What I built

The final idea behind the hack was to build an intelligent click-to-call for webpages (embeddable with a small script) that directs the call to the appropriate sales agent based on context. When the call is over, the information (context) gathered from the call is forwarded to the agent’s email/sms along with a link to the voice recording of the call. I called it Smart Dispatch.

How did I get information about the caller? In order to place the call, the client has to log in with LinkedIn and the information on profile is used as the context and sent over the email and sms when the call is over/

How is the call properly dispatched? I created a management platform for the companies embedding the click to call to link their agents to a particular segment pulled from LinkedIn. For example, if the user calling in has ‘Spanish’ as a language (on its LinkedIn profile), then the agent linked to the ‘Spanish’ segment will receive the call. This can be done for country, industry, or even particular companies (for account managers that want to receive calls only from their customers.)

How I built it?

1. I created the click-to-call with the Voxbone WebRTC-SIP SDK.
2. Used the LinkedIn API to place the logged-in user’s information into the X-Voxbone-Context SIP header which is passed along with the call. Fantastic! I can know pass contextual information to SIP endpoint.
3. I created a management tool (and REST API) to configure the different agents that receive the calls based on context
4. Hooked the WebRTC calls to a Restcomm instance (along with passing the context )
5. Restcomm does a lot in for Smart Dispatch! It records the call, and sends me back all the information so I can send an email and an SMS to the agents with the information of the caller (taken from LinkedIn) and the recording of the call. In the future it will even be able to forward the calls, send the sms and emails itself! The best part is – Restcomm is all drag and drop!

Easy, right? Though I implemented 5/6 APIs, I was able to get up and running within 10 hours! Thanks to the powers of WebRTC, and services like Restcomm and Voxbone.

More info & tutorial on how I built it: http://www.telestax.com/became-rockstar-tadhack-part-1/

Takeaways

This was my first TADHack event and it was definitely a success. Amazing crowd + world-class hacks + wonderful organizers + top location + a very laid-back atmosphere and a chance to talk with mentors = one of the best hackathons I’ve been to. Thanks Alan!

TADHack Global Next

Seeing the level of the hacks that were pitched this time, I realized that winning TADHack Global in Lisbon is another story. If anyone wants a chance to get a prize, they’ll really need to up their game, be in (mental) shape, know the APIs they’ll be using on the back of their hands, have a WOW factor, and potentially a business case for it.

I still don’t know what I’m going to hack but I get the feeling that I’ll need a small team (2-3) to share the workload if we want to be successful. Working with IoT (Internet of Things), VR (Virtual Reality), or any other trending topic will make the difference too.