64 Squares

Inspiration

Chess is one of the few games that never needed sight or steady hands. Blind players have competed for decades on pegged boards, calling out every move, and players who can't move the pieces say where they go. Online it's a different story. Most chess apps draw the board as one picture, so a screen reader finds nothing on it, and every move is a drag across a small screen. I wanted an app that works the other way round: you talk, it plays, and the screen is optional.

What it does

64 Squares is an Android chess app you can use entirely by voice. Echo, the voice inside the app, listens all the time, and you can tell it to stop.

Say "knight f3" and the move is played. You can play rated online games (blitz, rapid or classical), play a friend with a code, or take on the computer at four levels. Mid-game you can ask "where's my queen?" or "are they attacking my knight?" Puzzles are read out the way players describe a position: king first, your own pieces first. Hints tell you what to look at, never the move itself, and every hint is checked so it can't give the answer away. Game reviews work like a coach. Echo skips the quiet moves and stops where the game turned. You can interrupt, jump to any move, or ask "could I have played bishop takes f7?", and Echo checks the idea with Stockfish before answering. The screen works too. Every square is a real button that TalkBack can read. There are dark, light and high-contrast themes, big type, and nothing that depends on colour alone. You tap to move; nothing needs dragging. Playing is free. Pro (monthly or yearly) unlocks unlimited puzzles and reviews. If you can't pay, say "watch an ad" to get another review. Anyone can also gift a month of Pro into a shared pool, and any player can claim it, no questions asked.

How I built it

React Native (Expo) and TypeScript, so the board is made of real Android views that screen readers understand. Updates ship over the air. AssemblyAI streaming for speech recognition. OpenAI decides what Echo should do and which part of the app to use, and OpenAI text-to-speech gives Echo its voice. The speech is streamed, so Echo starts talking in about a second. Stockfish on the phone, for analysis and the computer opponent. A Cloudflare Worker with Durable Objects for game rooms, clocks and Elo ratings. RevenueCat for subscriptions, gifted months and tracking rewarded ads from AdMob.

Challenges

Hosted voice agents charge for every minute a conversation is open, silence included. That works out to about $4.50 per hour of chess, so I built my own pipeline where silence costs nothing. The phone's mic has no echo cancellation, so Echo kept hearing itself. It now pauses listening while it talks, and headphone users can turn on "talk over Echo". B, D and E sound almost the same out loud, so a lot of the work went into understanding moves however people say them. I started in Flutter and switched on day one. Its board is painted onto a canvas, so TalkBack can't reach individual squares.