main page
setup
rehearsal screen
novus

Project Description

What did you build?

Cadence is an AI-powered presentation rehearsal coach that gives you real-time feedback on your delivery tracking pacing, coverage, speech metrics, and content accuracy as you practice.

As a PhD student, I built this because fellow academics constantly ask me to review their presentation rehearsals and I ask them too. But schedules rarely align. Between courses, teaching responsibilities, and life, we often end up rehearsing alone with no feedback on content, pacing, or delivery. The same challenge affects business professionals preparing investor pitches, sales presentations, or executive briefings, and students practicing class presentations or defenses.

There's another reality: as generative AI has made cheating easier in academia, many institutions now rely more heavily on oral presentations for assessment. Here's the insight: generative AI helps you make presentations, but it can't help you deliver them. That's the gap Cadence fills.

Who it's for:

Academics preparing thesis defenses, conference talks, or teaching lectures
Business professionals rehearsing investor pitches, sales presentations, or executive briefings
Students practicing presentations when study partners aren't available

What it does:

Upload your slide deck (PDF) and configure session parameters (talk type, duration, audience level, formality)
AI analyzes each slide and suggests key points you should cover
Record yourself presenting slide-by-slide with live speech metrics (WPM, pauses, speaking density)
Get instant feedback on which points you covered, what you missed, and how to improve
Review comprehensive session reports with per-slide analytics and coaching insights

What I used: Built with vanilla JavaScript and Groq's fast LLM API for intelligent slide analysis and real-time transcript evaluation. The app runs entirely in-browser with Web Audio API for speech capture and analysis.

What I learned shipping it: This is the smallest of MVPs, but I learned something crucial: just ship it. I'd been following hackathons and wanted to participate in one but procrastination always won. When I discovered the "Mind the Product" hackathon's core principle just ship it, it doesn't matter what it is something clicked. I started this project in early June and committed to shipping by the deadline, no matter how rough. As cheesy as it sounds, I wanted to break my procrastination cycle. This hackathon gave me the push to finally do it, the blog below covers what i learned on the technical level.

P.S. The technical details and specific learnings from building this project are covered in : link