Blind Chess

♟️ Inspiration ♟️

My inspiration comes from the players around the world who play chess blindfolded. I wanted to bring this challenge to players all around the world who play by themselves on their browsers!

💪 What it does 💪

This project listens for chess moves given by the user and will move the pieces for them, as well as reading out the opponent's moves.

👷‍♂️How I built it👷‍♂️

I used a mix of Gemini and ElevenLabs API's to read my opponent's moves and interpret mine.

🏁Challenges I ran into🏁

I had a really tough time with the ElevenLabs API documents for Python Quick Development as I didn't have ffmpeg and a couple of other dependencies that weren't brought up until I got the code perfect. The error messages were a little hard to debug but once I got past that it was all smooth sailing :)

🏆Accomplishments🏆

Getting all of the code working and doing this all by myself honestly, this project was such a rollercoaster, nonstop coding for the entire time. Getting it to work with just 1 hour left on the clock genuinely made me scream in excitement.

🧠What I learned🧠

I learned a lot about Gemini's API's. For a while I really tried to use Computer-Use Gemini because it sounded perfect for my use-case. Unfortunately I just couldn't find a way to fit it in, however that didn't stop me from trying for a few hours which forced me to learn quite a bit about it.

👨‍🦯What's next for Blind Chess👨‍🦯‍➡️

Blind Chess' next step is to become a Chrome Extension for chess players who want to (or are otherwise forced to) play blind. I will finetune the code to be more accepting of edge-cases especially because there were many moments where the code I had reading the notations would see a "g" as a "9" or an a as a 6... Like I said, it's been a messy 24 hours, but I'm glad to say this isn't where this project will end.