Searching Media Files on Dropbox Using Clarify.io

About a month and a half ago I competed in a hackathon in Lisbon, Portugal called TADHack. The gathering was for developers and companies looking to create new and interesting apps in the telecom space. I created a quick application called Tadslack that showed how to integrate services from three companies I believe to be leading edge in next-generation communications: Telestax, Clarify.io and Slack.  If you want to watch the video of my presentation, or download the source code, go ahead.

Integrating Clarify.io and Dropbox

After I got back from Lisbon, I started talking with the fine folks at Clarify about another idea I had for how to use their service. A lot of people I know use Dropbox as the way to manage their media files. However, there’s not an easy way to search those media files (audio, video) without having them transcribed and then somehow coordinating the transcription with the file.

What if we integrated Dropbox’s API with Clarify and let users manage their media in Dropbox, but make it searchable using Clarify?

I set out, along with my fine troupe of developers, to solve just that problem. After a lot of haggling with the Dropbox API, we created a really neat NodeJS application that allows a user to drop files into a folder on Dropbox and have Clarify automatically index them and make them searchable.  The results were as good or better than I had hoped. You can watch the demo video below.

Get the Application

If you want to see how we pulled off the integration, you can download the source code from Github. I’ve included instructions on how to configure the whole thing.  If you have any issues, you can find me on Twitter most anytime.

I’d love to know what you think, and by all means if you’d like to fork it and make it better please do so.  Also, a special thanks to the Clarify.io team for all their help in making this integration happen.