Recaius x Hardware hackathon

Last March, I participated in the Recaius x Hardware hackathon, an event organized by Toshiba and JellyWare. The hackathon was held at Tokyo Telecom center's MONO co-working space, and was preceded by 2 hands-on that took place at DMM.make AKIBA Base and TechShop Tokyo respectively.



Recaius is a cloud service that provides a web API for your applications to use functionality such as voice recognition or voice synthesis. At the moment (May 2016), the API documentation is available only in Japanese, but there are several source code examples that you can check out from their github repository (check speech2text and text2speech for voice recognition and voice synthesis node.js application examples).

During the hackathon, attendants participated in several brainstorming sessions, and were later grouped together according to the affinity of their ideas. Each group worked hard on a common idea and finally presented it, together with a prototype demo, to the other groups and to the hackathon's committee. My main contribution was building a small wooden drawer that could be operated through a serial command interface.

To my joy and surprise, my team was awarded with a generous second prize. Thank you very much to the event organizers and to all of the attendants. For more information, an article in Japanese describing the event can be found here.