Kisi elevating office vibes with customized entrance music

In August, Kisi hosted its annual summer hack week in Stockholm. From Argentina to India, the product team came together to work on exciting projects and embark on a mission to "hack the office." After an action-packed week, we unveiled ten impressive projects, including:

• A new way to explore Kisi products using augmented reality (AR)
• An emergency roll call list, designed for administrators to swiftly verify the safety of all present users
• An physical emergency stop button, ensuring a quick and secure lockdown of the space

In this blog series we will delve into each of these hack week projects. And, who knows, you might discover solutions that could improve your own organization's approach to workplace security and efficiency.

Transforming office entry with personalized background music

Three passionate music aficionados—Rahul Kasana, Ashish Mishra, and Katalin Haverinen-Varga—decided to work on an app that allows employees to orchestrate their entrance with their favorite theme song. Because, let's be honest, who wouldn't love stepping into the office with their own anthem playing in the background?

However, this project isn't just about having fun at the office—it's also about boosting overall workplace happiness and productivity. According to a study, "positive employee experience can make employees feel happier and more satisfied, which in turn contributes to increased employee engagement and loyalty, and ultimately improves the performance of employees."

Unlock door to play Taylor Swift

The app's requirements included several key functionalities:

• Enabling users to log in with their Kisi accounts
• Input a YouTube link to play a song of their choice
• Enter custom text for personalized playback
• Leveraging the event webhook, specifically focusing on unlock events to trigger playing the song / text

As a result, the user's favorite song or custom text would play when they unlocked the main door of the Kisi office.

Getting hands-on

The team started by crafting a Node.js script to listen for Kisi unlock events and play sounds using the play-sound third-party library. They set up a local Node.js server to run the script. To make their server accessible online, they used ngrok and linked it to an event webhook for seamless communication.

Following that, they created a database to store user preferences and developed the actual web app. Simultaneously, they worked on the user interface using Ant Design. To make the web app available to users, they deployed it on Vercel.

The result: a small application that allowed users to log in using their Kisi account, add a YouTube URL or, if preferred, a custom text.

As the project neared completion, they took time to document their progress and prepare a demo for the team. For the rest of the week, the app was running at the main entrance of the Kisi office, allowing people to test it with their favorite songs - or favorite dad jokes.

Further use cases

Playing music is just one of the many ways organizations can use the Deep Purple app. The team has identified further use cases:

• Emergency announcements: To automatically deliver vital information during an emergency situation
• Conference room bookings: Announcing custom messages when guests enter conference rooms
• Visitor notifications: To notify you when a visitor arrives
• Security alerts: To alert you on intrusion events or tampering
• Access link alerts: To announce when someone unlocks a space using an access link, adding an extra layer of awareness

What’s your use case?

Would you like to try Kisi’s Deep Purple app at your organization? Do you have any use cases where the app would be beneficial? If so, please don't hesitate to reach out. Also, stay tuned as we will delve into each of the hack week projects in the coming weeks.