Bootcamp Graduate Turned Co-Founder

Have you also received those voice messages in WhatsApp, and been unable to listen to the messages there and then? Alumni Sara Battilotti was chatting with friends about the issue, and how much Italians just love sending long voice notes. "The founder of a small Italian tech company, Bandstand Software, happened to be in the conversation, so the two of us thought let’s try and solve for this pain." Sara says, and that was the start of the app AudioBriefly.

Sara, you are now a frontend developer - what did you do before that?

"I have a background in sales & analytics. I’ve worked for companies such as LinkedIn, Zendesk, Segment and Hopin until last year I was made redundant, like many others in the industry. Terrible, but it gave me some time to stop and think. I realized that what I really loved about my job was building innovative solutions and solving customer problems. So I took a leap and started learning how to code. In the background I had been following Technigo and thinking about joining the Web Dev Bootcamp since 2020, redundancy just gave me the push I needed to finally join."

Did you have any previous experience with coding?

"In my previous business roles in tech product companies I was constantly seeing “the opposite side of the coin” - how users interacted with the finished product: the good, the bad and the ugly. I was always soooo curious to understand how these experiences were actually built and how the code worked." "I really wanted to be able to dive deeper into the technicalities of the product itself and my dream was to be able to eventually build my own."

Tell us more about AudioBriefly, how does it work?

"I was super lucky to collaborate with a senior engineer with a lot of industry experience who was confident in making software design choices. The concept of the app itself is quite streamlined - you’re in a meeting or in some other situation and you get a voice note on WhatsApp, however you can’t/don’t want to listen to it. Grocery shopping lists via audio note anyone? AudioBriefly will summarize it and transcribe it for you inside of WhatsApp itself. The product works on desktop as well, users can upload long audio files in their profile and they get transcript/summaries that they can then manage.

However on the code side of course things are a bit more complex. We needed a frontend for the user to interact with, as well as a user management layer and the backend working all of the black magic needed. We ended up building an end to end solution in Typescript with a React frontend hosted on GCP using Firebase & integrated with third party APIs such as Twilio and Paddle. A lot of the tech we used was on a first time basis for me, I learned so much and I’m incredibly proud of our little mighty product."

Whats your goal, what happens next?

"Now that AudioBriefly is alive and kicking, we’re trying to drive adoption, and improve the solution based on user feedback. We’d love to add new features and make it a one stop solution for voice to text. Stay tuned!"