PopQ

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We are expecting a girl, and we are excited. That is also about when you start wondering what you would actually do if a baby chokes.

There are courses for that, and around Amsterdam they are aimed at expecting parents like us. They cost quite some money, and they teach the Dutch version of everything: 112 for an emergency, the huisartsenpost for a fever in the middle of the night, HartslagNu to bring a volunteer with a defibrillator. We will be spending part of our time in Sweden, where 112 is the same and almost everything after it has a different name.

So instead of booking one, I built ours. It follows the syllabus the Dutch courses are examined on and the current resuscitation guidelines, in twelve modules that run from getting help through choking, burns and fever. Wherever Sweden does something differently, the slide says so right there. Every slide also links to where its content came from, because this is not a subject where either of us should be trusting the word of a potentially hallucinating AI.

Then we got to the questions

Each module ends with multiple choice questions, and that is where it stopped behaving like a course. How deep do you push on a baby's chest? You pick an answer, you find out, and it stays with you far longer than the paragraph you read two minutes earlier.

It also felt familiar. Over the years we have hosted a few trivia games for friends, usually as one part of a bigger event, and what I had on the screen was most of a trivia night already. It only needed more than two players.

So it moved to the TV. One person starts a game there, and everyone else scans a code and plays on their own phone, with nothing to install and nothing to sign up for. When the last answer comes in, the TV shows the right one, who picked what, and the scores. It turned out to be quite fun.

Once it was a game, it no longer had to be about first aid. PopQ now plays two kinds of quiz: a course, which teaches and then tests, and a trivia, which skips the teaching and goes straight to the questions.

Then a friend suggested voice

At that point the TV showed its questions in silence. A friend suggested adding a voice, given how many great text-to-speech models are out there these days. That is where the hosts came from. Every quiz now has its own pair, each with a name, a face, a voice and a character picked to suit the topic, and whoever is talking appears in a corner of the screen.

They do not read the slides out. They welcome the room, open each round and put every question in their own words, so you can answer without looking up from your phone.

The voices are generated, with each host's character steering how their lines are read.

Joining a game needs nothing but its code. Hosting one is invite only for now, so if you want to run a quiz night of your own, reach out and I will set you up with a host login.

Status

Invite only at popq.nl

Built with

Go, Firestore, Cloud Run, Google Cast, Gemini TTS

Name

A pop quiz, cut short