Spellit.info - A Web App to Simplify Sharing Information Over the Phone

For almost 8 years now, I've been living in the US, and I've faced difficulty pronouncing my 11-character long first name and 12-character last name over the phone. This becomes particularly challenging when booking a doctor's appointment for my daughter because I have to spell both her name and mine for insurance purposes. Before making these appointments, I used to open the NATO Phonetic Alphabet in my browser to help me pronounce the alphabet correctly.

I've often wondered why there isn't a simple solution to address this issue. Whenever I try to come up with a solution, I tend to overcomplicate it in my mind, which has kept me from attempting to execute any ideas. One day I finally decided to create a very basic prototype just for myself to share information more easily over the phone. I opted for free options available in the market to experiment with the prototype.

For the prototype, I utilized React with Jotai for state management and Supabase for persisting data, which allows real-time updates through WebSocket. To host the app, I decided to go with Netlify because that offers Serverless functions which are very handy.

Generally, I tend to spend a lot of time considering domain names before proceeding, but this time, I decided not to waste time on it. During the development process, I came up with "spellit.info" and it felt like the perfect fit for what I was trying to achieve with the project. Naming variables and functions has always been the most challenging aspect of development, in my opinion. I checked its availability on Google Domains and successfully registered the domain.

After a few detours, I finally finished the basic version of spellit.info and hosted it on Netlify. Additionally, I integrated Google Analytics to gain insights into the geographic and usage patterns of the users. I haven't shared it on Twitter, LinkedIn, or any other social media platform because I want to personally experience its functionality first-hand.

To share information, the user can click on the 'New Space' option.

A random number serves as the space identifier, and there will be a designated area to input the information.

To join the space, you must share the identifier with the other person, and then they have to enter it in the text box and click join the space.

Upon joining the space, the information will be displayed on the screen along with a "copy to clipboard" icon.

As I mentioned earlier, the application utilizes Supabase's real-time updates, ensuring that any new information added by a person is immediately reflected on the other side.

To experience this in the real world, I started making calls to new dental offices to book an appointment for my daughter. As expected, they asked me to spell both my daughter's and my name. I mentioned that there is a web app called spellit.info, which makes it easy to share names over the phone. However, the person on the other end apologized and said they couldn't visit a random website. Consequently, I had to resort to using the NATO sheet and eventually booked an appointment.

The same scenario repeated when I called another dental office for my other daughter. Once again, the person on the phone cited the same reason for not using the web app. This left me feeling disappointed because I wasn't able to use the app in the real world.

When I was trying to find a solution to this issue, I was solely thinking from my perspective and didn't consider the other side of the situation. Interestingly, I myself do the same thing when a random person asks me to visit an unfamiliar website to share information. If I hadn't actually executed this project, I would have continued to believe that the solution would fix the issue, but in reality, it turned out differently. Now that I've tried it and didn’t work as I expected. In the future, I might chat with contact center folks to get their take on this issue. Hearing from the people who deal with phone stuff regularly could give me some cool thoughts.

So, spellit.info was my attempt to solve the pronunciation problem when sharing information over the phone. But turns out, people don't want to visit random websites for security reasons. Lesson learned! Let's find a better way to make information-sharing easier for everyone! 🚀