🎧 Live Darbar (Flutter + Firebase + Siri)
- A live audio streaming app for Golden Temple (Amritsar), my hometown’s holiest Sikh site
- Features:
- Live audio + background playback
- Firebase backend
- iOS Siri integration (App Intents + App Shortcuts)
- Auto recording from live audio stream (not mic)
- Timer & sleep functionality
- Published to Google Play & App Store
- Made a YouTube tutorial on Siri + Flutter integration
Flutter web preview (with limited features):
Flutter + Siri integration:
🪔 The Story Behind Live Darbar
When I first started learning Flutter, I didn’t want to just build a “Hello World” or a to-do list app. I wanted to create something real, something useful, something that would matter — even if only to a few people close to me.
So I asked myself:
What’s something I could build that my own family would actually use every day?
That’s when the idea hit me:
A live audio app streaming Gurbani (holy Sikh hymns) directly from the Golden Temple (Harmandir Sahib) in Amritsar — my hometown, and the most sacred site in Sikhism.
It was personal. It was meaningful. And it was buildable.
I rolled up my sleeves and began experimenting with the just_audio Flutter package — which, back then, was still early in development. I studied the documentation, followed blog posts by its creator, and slowly started stitching together a working audio player.
But I didn’t stop there.
I added Firebase Firestore to store the daily schedule — the list of Ragis (holy musicians) and their duties. To keep this data fresh, I wrote a Python scraper and used GitHub Actions to run it every night at 2 a.m. IST. It would fetch the latest schedule from the official website and push it to Firestore. When someone opened the app, they’d see the latest, most accurate information.
That became v1 of the app — a simple but powerful tool for anyone, anywhere in the world, who wanted to connect with the Golden Temple’s live kirtan.
For me, it wasn’t just a Flutter project.
It was my first real app, with a real backend, real users, and a real emotional connection.
And it reminded me why I love building things:
To make something small — that could mean something big.
📱 Publishing, Rejections & Real-World Lessons
After building the core features, I decided to take the leap and publish Live Darbar to the App Store and Google Play.
This was a whole new journey — full of policies, guidelines, and rejection emails that felt like personal insults (😅).
As any first-time mobile developer learns the hard way:
Your first build will get rejected.
Maybe the second too.
And the third…
But I persisted.
I read guidelines. I rewrote descriptions. I tweaked privacy policies. I optimized icons.
Eventually — success!
Live Darbar is now live on both platforms:
🗣️ Voice Assistant Integration – Siri vs Google
I wanted to take things one step further and add voice assistant support — to allow users to play the audio hands-free, using Siri or Google Assistant.
I integrated Siri Shortcuts and App Intents successfully for iOS.
Now, users can say:
“Hey Siri, play Live Darbar”
…and it just works.
I attempted the same with Google Assistant’s App Actions, but ran into persistent tooling issues.
- The Android Studio plugin is broken and hasn’t been updated.
- I raised the issue multiple times with the Google Assistant App Actions team — they initially replied, then ghosted me like a bad first date.
So for now:
- ✅ Siri integration is live, also made a YouTube tutorial on it.
- ❌ Google Assistant integration… pending, thanks to tooling purgatory
Still, this process taught me so much — not just about Flutter, but about navigating platform ecosystems, talking to real users, and learning through rejection.
🌍 Vision Ahead – AI Meets Spiritual Listening
One of my most loyal users?
My mom ❤️
She listens to Live Darbar daily — not just as a user, but as my unofficial QA engineer.
If anything breaks, whether it’s a backend issue or stream outage, she’s the first to ping me on WhatsApp:
“Harkirat, app is down.”
Thanks to her, I’ve debugged countless issues — and also realized how much this app means to real people.
At peak, I’ve seen 100 downloads on play store, which might sound modest, but for an app with such a specific use case, it means the world to me. These users — often my extended family and friends of friends — tune in for peace, routine, and spiritual connection.
🔮 My Next Step – An AI-Powered Gurbani Engine
Here’s where I want to take it next:
Imagine this:
You open the app, and instead of just hearing the live audio, you can also see the exact line (Shabad) of Gurbani being sung — synced in real-time, like karaoke for the soul.
The Vision:
Build an AI-powered engine that:
- 🎧 Listens to the live audio stream
- ✍️ Transcribes the Gurbani being sung
- 🔎 Matches it to a database of sacred texts
- 🪄 Displays the exact line, with previous/next context
- 📈 Grows smarter over time, learning patterns between ragas, shabads, and daily ceremonies
Technically, the components already exist:
- ✅ Searchable Gurbani databases
- ✅ First-letter indexing inference
- ✅ Speech recognition models that can be fine-tuned
- ✅ APIs that can be built to be open, reusable, and inclusive
All I need now is:
- ⏳ Time
- 🧠 Skills in applied AI
- 🙏 …and maybe a collab with SGPC (or maybe I just go solo and open-source it!)
It’s a passion project — not just for me, but for the global Sikh community.
So that one day, no one has to manually search a Shabad again.
The app just listens — and shows it, beautifully and respectfully.