VoiceMask was a Discord bot I made back in August 2020. Discord has a feature called voice channels, which are mini spaces for voice chat. Although they are quite useful, for those that do not have a mic or feel uncomfortable talking in a voice channel, voice channels quickly become limitations.
In short, VoiceMask was a text-to-speech bot: users typed what they wanted to say and then the bot would say it out loud in the voice channel.
At its peak, VoiceMask reached 1,500 Discord servers and served thousands of users.
Unfortunately I had to take it down as the costs to host it became too high.
However, despite the fact that I had to take it down, I learned a lot from building it and watching it grow.
What amazes me to this day are the ways VoiceMask was used. For example, one community used the bot to hold a local dating session. Participants learned about each other by talking through the bot, with the goal being that the participants would put in the effort to learn about each other's personalities and base their decisions on those interactions, rather than on physical traits which may warrant implicit bias. I would have never thought that people could use my simple Discord bot to find love.