BlinkTalk AI

Inspiration

People living with ALS, stroke, or severe paralysis often keep full mental clarity but lose the ability to speak or use their hands. Dedicated eye-tracking communication devices exist, but they are often very expensive and out of reach for many families. We asked: what if any laptop with a webcam could become a voice?

What it does

BlinkTalk AI lets a person communicate using only eye blinks and a regular webcam — no special hardware, no installation.

The webcam detects intentional blinks in real time.
A scanning keyboard highlights letters and quick phrases; a blink selects one.
An AI layer predicts what the user wants to say. Typing just "wa" can suggest "I'm thirsty, can I have some water?" — turning dozens of blinks into a few.
The selected sentence is spoken aloud with text-to-speech.
An emergency phrase ("I need help") is always one blink away.

How we built it

MediaPipe Face Landmarker runs in the browser to track facial landmarks and blink scores.
Blink detection uses a calibrated threshold plus a minimum duration, so natural blinks are ignored and only deliberate long blinks count.
[LLM API name] generates context-aware sentence suggestions from partial input.
Web Speech API reads sentences aloud.
Everything runs as a static web app in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; video never leaves the user's device.

Challenges we ran into

[e.g., separating natural blinks from intentional ones, lighting and glasses, keeping AI suggestions fast enough...]

Accomplishments that we're proud of

[e.g., speaking a full sentence in under X blinks...]

What we learned

[What you learned about computer vision, accessibility, prompt design...]

What's next for BlinkTalk AI

Testing with real users and caregivers
Turkish and other languages
Personalized phrase prediction that learns the user's vocabulary
Caregiver alert notifications

Credits & AI assistance

Built during LaunchPad Hacks (Oct 16 – Nov 20, 2026). Uses MediaPipe (Google), Web Speech API, and [LLM API]. AI tools were used to assist with [code/writing].