Tarouq
Tarouq is an Arabic app for live poetic dialogues (muhawara) in the Gulf tradition. Poets take turns performing verses in group arenas, and a generated virtual audience sings each verse back with applause, while poetry lovers follow, comment and support their favourite poets. We built the full backend: API, real-time engine and audio service.
- Culture · Poetry · Social audio
- Poetry platform (Saudi Arabia)
- 2026
- Backend services: API, real-time, audio
- 3
- Poet seats per arena
- 2 or 4
- Real-time dialogues and chat
- Live
- Generated virtual audience
- AI
The story
Project overview
01
The challenge
Muhawara, the sung poetic dialogue of the Gulf, lives at weddings and evening gatherings, where a row of men repeats each verse back to the poet. Poets in different cities had no way to hold a real dialogue together online, and a recorded verse on social media loses the turn-taking and the crowd that make the art what it is.
02
What we built
We built a platform where poets meet in group arenas with two or four seats, public or invite-only, each with its own owner, managers and stage theme. A real-time engine runs the dialogue: it manages turns, lets poets move to the next verse, repeat one or open with a sung mawal, and keeps a poet's seat during short disconnections instead of ending the session. After every verse, a dedicated audio service turns the poet's recording into a two-row virtual crowd with shifted voices, applause and balanced loudness, so the app recreates the feel of a live gathering. Around the dialogues sit a social layer of posts, follows, private chat, live comments and gifts, plus poet subscriptions, a diamond wallet and admin tools.
Key features
- Public and invite-only arenas with 2 or 4 poet seats
- Real-time turn engine: next verse, repeat and mawal
- Generated virtual audience that sings each verse back
- Random poet matchmaking into temporary arenas
- Seat kept during short disconnections
- Live comments, cheers and online and live-now status
- Private chat with read receipts and missed-message replay
- Posts with images and video, likes, comments and follows
- Poet subscriptions, diamond packages and gifts
- Wallets and withdrawal requests for poets
- Phone OTP, email and social login
- Push notifications and admin APIs for users, posts and payments
Results
Tarouq is live on the App Store and Google Play, with a website at tarouq.com. Poets hold dialogues in public and private arenas, and the platform runs on three dedicated backend services: the main API, the real-time dialogue engine and the virtual-audience audio service.
Tarouq
Screenshots
A closer look at the screens we designed and built.
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