Rizz-istential Crisis

Real-time ambient speech monitor that detects brainrot phrases, nukes your aura score, and fires GIFs + AI bad advice every time you say sigma, rizz, or skibidi. No cap.

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Inspiration

the brainrot epidemic is real and spreading. your coworkers have it. your professors have it. you might have it and not even know. we asked ourselves: what if there was a tool that listened to everything you said and publicly shamed you every time you said something unhinged?

What it does

Rizz-istential Crisis is a real-time ambient speech monitoring platform. It listens to your microphone continuously using the Web Speech API and detects brainrot phrases — "sigma", "rizz", "skibidi", "no cap", "aura", "gyatt", and 20+ more.

When a phrase is detected:

  • a GIF explodes on screen and a sound plays
  • your Aura Score gets modified (sigma = good, skibidi = catastrophic)
  • Gemini AI generates bad advice specifically tuned to be unhelpful
  • a combo multiplier activates if you say two phrases within 5 seconds (1.5×, 2×, up to 3×)
  • go below zero aura and enter Aura Debt — the UI tells you "ur in debt bestie"

A separate Live Feed page shows every detection across all users in real time, with a global leaderboard ranked by aura score. There's also a 2016 Mode for the historians: harambe, damn daniel, deez nuts, what are those.

The aura modifier formula is simple: $$\text{effective modifier} = \text{base modifier} \times \text{combo multiplier}$$ where combo multiplier $c$ is defined as: $$c = \begin{cases} 1 & \text{combo} = 1 \ 1.5 & \text{combo} = 2 \ 2 & \text{combo} = 3 \ 3 & \text{combo} \geq 4 \end{cases}$$

How we built it

Frontend: React 18 + Vite. No UI framework. All CSS is handwritten and intentionally bad. Comic Sans is load-bearing architecture.

Speech pipeline: Web Speech API with continuous listening and interim results. getUserMedia with noiseSuppression, echoCancellation, and autoGainControl constraints keeps the audio pipeline optimised for far-away speakers.

Detection engine: Custom BrainrotDetector class with three layers:

  1. Word-boundary regex for exact matches (\bphrase\b)
  2. Substring matching for multi-word phrases
  3. Levenshtein edit-distance fuzzy fallback for single words ≥ 5 characters; catches mishears like "riz" -> rizz and "aurora" -> aura

Cloud stack:

  • Firebase Realtime Database: detection events written in real time, subscribed to by the live feed and leaderboard
  • Firebase Auth: Google OAuth gates the main app
  • Google Cloud Storage: full session transcripts + detection logs exported as versioned JSON, streamed every 15 seconds
  • Google Cloud Functions: server-side proxy for GCS writes
  • Gemini API (gemini-2.0-flash): generates contextual bad advice after each detection

Challenges

Stale closures everywhere. React 18 concurrent rendering + async detection handlers + a 15-second streaming interval meant every captured value was stale. Solution: mirror all critical state into refs (auraRef, detectionsRef, finalSegmentsRef, etc.) and read exclusively from refs inside async contexts and intervals.

"Rizz" transcription. The Web Speech API consistently transcribes "rizz" as "riz", "chris", or "ritz" depending on accent and context. We added alias phrases with a displayName override and fuzzy matching as a fallback. The word cannot escape us.

onerror("aborted") spam. Chrome fires this event every time SpeechRecognition auto-restarts between utterances. This is not an error. We ignore it now. We are at peace.

Intentionally bad UI that's still usable. There is a fine line between "chaotic brainrot aesthetic" and "unreadable garbage". We found that line. We crossed it twice. We came back.

What we learned

  • The Web Speech API is extremely powerful and extremely chaotic and we have a complicated relationship with it now
  • React refs are the correct solution to stale closures in async contexts and nobody talks about this enough
  • Gemini is very good at giving bad advice when you ask it to
  • "Comic Sans as a deliberate design choice" is a sentence you can say with a straight face
  • Harambe still has cultural power in 2025. some things are forever.

Built With

Category Technologies
Languages JavaScript (ES2022)
Frontend React 18, React Router v6, Vite, CSS3
APIs Web Speech API, Web Audio API (getUserMedia)
AI Google Gemini API (gemini-2.0-flash)
Auth Firebase Authentication (Google OAuth)
Database Firebase Realtime Database
Cloud Storage Google Cloud Storage
Cloud Functions Google Cloud Functions (Node.js)
Hosting Vite (static)

© 2025 Rizz-istential Crisis Inc. Legally incorporated in Ohio. All aura lost is non-refundable. Chad is not a financial advisor.

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