Since Essential discontinued, I was allowed to share one of the 3 projects I built on the Summer of 2019: Walkie Talkie. I'm extremely sad that Essential's Project GEM will not be coming to the market because this Android application was going to be an Easter Egg for the future phone; it also acted as a prototype for the company-wide Voice Mode feature. Walkie Talkie was made for the dimensions of Project GEM (shown above) and it does exactly what it's name says: it streams voice input to other users.


THE BASICS: I designed an Android app that dynamically translates sound waves into chunks of bytes while also sending these bytes at a certain rate across a socket server. (This required multithreading.) I created a voice input/output socket server hosted on AWS to stream to all users in the same "squad". Pressing the Walkie Talkie button can also send push notifications to a friend that isn't currently on the app.


With the guidance of the Android and server-side experts at Essential, I built a scalable server and application that dynamically stores user data into Firebase Realtime Database. The app enables user customization, as one can edit their username, save friends/groups, and even map their fingerprints to friends; moreover, I integrated the fingerprint sensor as a way to choose users to stream to.

Here are some of the tools I used: