Build your own app

Antiphony is the infrastructure, not the app. It gives you the call-and-response building blocks — audio posts, replies, identity, transcription — and you build the experience. Vox Pop is one app built on it; this repo ships another (apps/reference). Nothing stops you from building a third — a mobile client, a custom embed, a Slack bot, a static site that lists a creator’s prompts, a call-in voicemail wall.

This page covers what the core gives you and the getting-started path for building against it. For a worked example, see the reference app walkthrough.

What the open core gives you

Capability	Where it lives	What you call
Audio upload & playback	apps/core-api audio routes	POST /api/v1/audio/upload, POST /api/v1/audio/upload-pending (anonymous), and the audio resolver GET /api/v1/audio?url=… (302s to a short-lived signed URL).
Audio posts (call & response)	posts service	A creator publishes a prompt (an audio.post with no reply); the audience records replies (audio.posts with a reply StrongRef). POST /api/v1/posts, GET /api/v1/posts, GET /api/v1/posts/{id}, GET /api/v1/posts/{id}/replies.
Transcription	platform enrichment	Machine transcripts (dev.antiphony.audio.transcript) generated asynchronously and lifted into the embed’s view at read time — no extra call.
Public REST API	apps/core-api	The full /api/v1/* JSON surface with a consistent auth + envelope contract. See the API reference.
AT Protocol lexicons	lexicons/ + packages/shared	MIT-licensed dev.antiphony.* records — audio.post, embed.audio, audio.transcript, actor.profile — plus the Zod schemas that mirror them. See The Antiphony lexicons.
Capture primitives	apps/reference/src/capture	A neutral mic recorder, waveform helper, and audio player — the seed for a shared capture kit once a second client needs them.

Note

Some capabilities are split: the open core ships the lexicon definitions and the pure record→lexicon transform, while the PDS I/O and OAuth client (the publishing side of AT Proto) live in the hosted layer. The lexicons document the records; the architecture documents the seam.

Start from the example app you can actually run

The example to learn from lives right here in this repo: apps/reference, a small Vite + React SPA that signs in anonymously, records audio, uploads it, creates a post, and renders the hydrated view. It is deliberately unbranded — the point is to prove the protocol is usable by a client carrying no product’s design language. It depends on nothing a hosted product keeps private: same public endpoints, same @antiphony/shared types.

If you can build apps/reference, you can build your own surface. The reference app walkthrough reads it top to bottom.

Getting-started path

1. Run the core locally. Follow the quick start to get /api/v1/* serving against the Firebase emulators.
2. Authenticate. Almost everything needs a bearer token — a Firebase ID token (anonymous is fine for a public surface) or a session cookie. See Authentication.
3. Upload audio, then create a post.

   # upload returns a storage ref you place in the post's embed
   curl -X POST $BASE/api/v1/audio/upload -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" -F file=@clip.wav
   curl -X POST $BASE/api/v1/posts -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     -d '{ "text": "Ask me anything", "embed": { ... } }'

4. Read it back and render it. GET /api/v1/posts/{id} returns a hydrated view — the post, its author, the audio embed with a signed playback URL, the lifted transcript (when ready), and per-viewer state. Drop that payload into your own UI.
5. Thread replies. A reply is a post whose reply.root/reply.parent point at the prompt; list them with GET /api/v1/posts/{id}/replies.

Where next?

• Reference app — the worked apps/reference walkthrough.
• The Antiphony lexicons — the records behind every payload above.
• API reference — auth, envelope, and the full endpoint surface.
• Architecture — the route → service → dependency seams you’d extend.