Khamosh! Auto-silence app calms nerves at IIT

Khamosh! Auto-silence app calms nerves at IIT

Silencer, an Android application developed by four IIT-B students that automatically puts phones on silent during class, is all the rage on campus
Posted On Wednesday, October 03, 2012 at 03:06:16 AM

Fed up of being embarrassed by their cellphones ringing during college lectures, students at IIT have come up with the perfect solution - an Android app called Silencer.

What this app does is very simple - it automatically puts the phone on silent once a lecture starts and returns it to normal mode once it's over.

Developed by four students from IIT Bombay for a competition (which they didn't win, incidentally) the app has become quite the rage on campus.

Silencer is the brainchild of final-year computer science students Aayush Singhal, Kanwal Prakash Singh and Ravi Vishwakarma, and final-year electrical engineering student Yudhister Satija.

They built the app in just two days, then tested it for a week before making it available for students to download to their smartphones. The application was put up on student servers at the end of August and has since been downloaded 550 times.

"All of us have been in the limelight at least once for forgetting to put our cellphones on silent. That is where this idea came from. In IIT, every course has a fixed slot. All the user has to do is select his/her slot and the application will turn on silent and normal modes automatically,” said Kanwal Singh.

Professor Urjit Yagnik, dean of student affairs at IIT-B, said, “Considering that classes get disturbed at times because of cellphones, it’s a very helpful application. The reason why I’m encouraging these students is that these kinds of projects foster creativity and productivity."

Right now the application is useful only for IIT-B students. However, the group has plans to take it one step further and make it applicable to anyone. “We will now try to sync the application to the Google calendar on anyone’s phone so that people can automatically their phones turn silent during meetings and other appointments,” said Aayush Singhal.



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