Burning Man Global Marketplace

Inspiration

At Burning Man, people connect beyond barriers: art, culture, and creativity unite everyone. I wanted to bring that same spirit to global trade, where language remains the biggest barrier. Tariffs and geopolitical uncertainty has made doign trade more difficult.

My inspiration: Make it possible for two people who don’t share a language to still trust, trade, and talk seamlessly.

What it does

Burning Man Global Marketplace is a real-time multilingual voice trading assistant. Two users : say an American buyer and a Serbian supplier can negotiate instantly, each speaking their own language.The system translates, preserves all numbers and prices, and re-voices the conversation live, creating frictionless cross-border communication and quick trade among changing tariffs and geopolitical tensions.

How we built it

I built a Vapi-powered real-time voice room, connected to a multilingual LLM translation layer that detects speech language, converts it, and re-speaks in under a second. • Vapi → Live ASR + TTS streaming • LLM layer → Translation + numeric consistency • Apify → Currency data normalization • Vercel → Frontend hosting and deployment All wrapped in a minimal Next.js interface with visual transcripts and sentiment cues.

Challenges we ran into

• Maintaining low latency while translating and re-speaking live.
• Preserving numbers, currencies, and units across languages.
• Achieving natural voice flow without awkward pauses or overlaps.
• Integrating multiple APIs with streaming events under hackathon time limits.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Achieved sub-1.5 s end-to-end translation and voice replay.
• Seamlessly merged voice + AI + commerce into one fluid interaction.
• Enabled the first live English↔Serbian trading negotiation demo at Burning Heroes.
• Created a project that’s both technically complex and emotionally human  true to the event’s creative spirit.

What we learned

• Real-time voice AI requires tight event orchestration between ASR, translation, and TTS.
• Creativity and human connection are as important as technical polish.
• Building for emotion (tone, trust, flow) matters as much as building for accuracy.

What's next for Burning Man Global Marketplace

I plan to expand this marketplace into a multilingual AI voice exchange for small exporters, artisans, and creators.

Next steps: • Support 20+ languages and automatic currency conversion • Integrate digital escrow and smart contract settlement • Launch pilot with Burning Heroes founders network as the first cross-border creator marketplace

Vision: Turn the spirit of Burning Man into a borderless global trading ecosystem where voice, trust, and creativity power commerce.

Built With

• 21st.dev
• apify
• cursor
• google-maps
• higgsfield
• omi
• vapi
• vercel