What kinds of cool things are people doing with Elixir these days, where they feel it's a really good fit for the problem domain?

Just wrapped up a live translation feature that watches an HLS live stream, live transcribes with whisper and then translates into 18 languages. Heavy use of OTP: supervision trees for each stream, ports for managing ffmpeg and receiving audio, async tasks for concurrently submitting chunks to translation API, etc. Transcription and translations provided in real-time via LiveView to about 4,000 viewers.

Little over 3 weeks from `mix new` to the live event. Not sure how I could have done it so easily without OTP and LiveView.

mjfisher

That's really cool. Managing ports is something I've done in elixir yet, but managing ffmpeg through elixir could be very useful for a few things in my current area of focus.

Can you share any details of how that works? E.g. do you operate on a single HLS chunk at a time, or can you get ffmpeg to separate a continuous audio stream, etc?

davidw

https://github.com/saleyn/erlexec is pretty good for handling external processes. The builtins aren't quite there if you have more complex use cases.