ClearSpeak

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Inspiration

My 8-year-old cousin is in third grade and struggles with reading comprehension, a problem far more common than it should be. We wanted to build something that made kids actually want to practice.

What it does

ClearSpeak gamifies reading practice for young children. Kids read AI-generated passages aloud, get real-time pronunciation feedback word by word, then answer comprehension questions to earn XP, stars, and levels.

How we built it

Built with React.js, Firebase for auth and data, Gemini API for passage and question generation, Microsoft Azure Speech-to-Text for real-time pronunciation assessment, and ElevenLabs for narration.

Challenges we ran into

Learning and integrating so many new APIs under hackathon time pressure was tough, especially getting Azure's real-time speech recognition to align accurately with our word-by-word highlighting system.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of how polished and child-friendly the UI turned out, from the animated space-themed progression dashboard to the real-time reading experience.

What we learned

We learned how to manage project scope under time pressure, work across multiple third-party APIs, and make intentional UI/UX decisions for a younger audience.