‘Tis the Hackathon Season at Cartesia

October 2024 was a busy month for Cartesia. We brought together over 2,000 builders across San Francisco and gave away $20,000 in prizes for the most innovative ideas built on Sonic. With fresh access to Sonic, developers transformed everything from web forms to robot chefs into voice-first experiences.

AGI House SF: Speech-to-Speech Innovation

The first event, hosted at AGI House SF on October 13th, focused on real-time applications leveraging OpenAI's real-time API and Cartesia's Sonic voice model. The event drew an impressive gathering of AI enthusiasts and builders eager to create new experiences with voice technology.

🏆 First Place: Form Wizard Pro

By Aditya P. Advani

Form Wizard Pro reimagines web interactions by transforming any online form into a voice-guided experience. This innovative approach to form-filling demonstrates how voice AI can make digital interactions more natural and accessible.

"Web forms are the engine on which the economy runs, it's time they started talking and took on personalities and vibes of their own!"

— Aditya Advani

(Source)

🥈 Second Place: Story Narrator AI

By Karthik Ramasamy

(Demo video here)

Story Narrator AI reinvents storytelling by putting young minds in the director's seat. The project seamlessly combines AI-powered narration with interactive storytelling, creating an engaging educational experience.

🥉 Third Place: SheBeTalking

By Hebe Hilhorst

(Demo video here)

SheBeTalking tackled real-world communication challenges with a creative twist, leveraging Cartesia's Sonic model to nail different speaking styles and tones. The project particularly impressed judges with its practical application and cultural sensitivity.

Notable Mention: Roasted.lol

By Jeremy, Jacob, Breck, and Christian

(Source)

The team behind Roasted.lol combined visual analysis with voice delivery to create an entertaining AI-powered roasting experience, showcasing the lighter side of AI applications.

Daily Hackathon: Open Source Innovation

Building on the momentum, Cartesia partnered with Daily for a two-day open-source focused hackathon from October 19-20, offering $20,000 in prizes across multiple categories.

🏆 First Place: Stella

By Brian and David Beros

(Demo video here)

Stella redefined the personal shopping experience by combining voice conversation, guided web browsing, and virtual clothing try-on.

The project showcased impressive integration of multiple AI services, including Cartesia's voice technology, Coval's testing framework, and Daily's real-time communication infrastructure.

🥈 Second Place: Foul-mouthed Robot Chef

By Alex Volkov, Junaid Dawud, and Daniel Ritchie

(Demo video here)

This ambitious hardware hack combined SO-ARM 100 robotics with Raspberry Pi, Google's Gemini Vision, and Cartesia's TTS capabilities.

The result? A robot chef with an attitude that captured everyone's imagination.

🥉 Third Place: VoiceUI

By Rami Mithalouni

(Demo video here)

The project enhanced voice AI conversations by intelligently fetching and rendering relevant visual content in real-time, demonstrating the powerful potential of multimodal AI interactions.

Cal Hacks 11.0

Rounding out our October hackathon series, Cartesia joined forces with UC Berkeley's Cal Hacks, one of the world's largest collegiate hackathons, where over 1,500 students gathered to push the boundaries of technology.

🏆 First Place: SpeakEasy

By Nikhil Ograin, Zayd Ali, Siddharth Shashi, and Smit Malde

SpeakEasy reimagines language learning by helping users maintain their natural voice and personality across languages. Using Cartesia's voice technology, the team built a tool that analyzes and mimics natural intonations, allowing learners to sound authentically like themselves in any language.

Notable Projects

Hamilton

By Tanmayi Dasari

Hamilton brings political engagement to life by simulating senate committee hearings through multi-agent AI interactions. The project cleverly combines Cartesia's voice technology with Autogen and Groq to create engaging political discourse simulations.

MafiAI

By Kevin Liu

This solo project MafiAI reimagines the classic social deduction game Mafia, creating AI agents that interact through voice to create an immersive gaming experience.

What's Next?

2,000+ developers, 50+ completed projects, and innovation spanning education, gaming, and robotics in just 8 days.

With Cartesia's commitment to providing efficient, accessible voice technology, we're excited to see what developers will build next.

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to our partners:

• AGI House SF for hosting our first October event
• Daily for co-organizing the open-source hackathon
• All sponsors including Pipecat, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, Vapi, Tavus, Coval, and Product Hunt
• Cal Hacks for bringing Sonic to the student innovation community
• The judges who provided valuable feedback and guidance
• All participants who brought their creativity and technical expertise

Want to participate in future Cartesia hackathons? Reach out to support@cartesia.ai to get updates on upcoming events.