Speakeasy

Real, tested analysis and advice
Engagement with other users
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Minecraft parkour gameplay for optimal engagement

Inspiration

Our team members ran into a challenge on social media recently: talk for a minute straight, trying your best to not stop and not use "like, ah, um, uh". After talking it through with some friends, we realized about 60% of them had thought about doing that challenge, but not a single one had actually done it! The pressure of posting yourself on social media and the accountability of posting every day meant they never got around to it. So, we wanted to fix that.

What it does

Speakeasy is your daily speaking coach designed to solve two core problems: Giving valuable skills: users record short speaking videos, then get concrete feedback on clarity, pace (WPM), filler words/rate, confidence, energy, strengths, improvements, and tips they can apply in the next session. Keeping people engaged: it turns practice into a habit with daily-video prompts, streaks, weekly scores/progress charts, and social motivation via optional public sharing, feed reactions, and notifications. It helps people improve how they speak, while making sure they keep showing up long enough to actually get better.

How we built it

Five hours of brainstorming and challenging each others' ideas, and nineteen hours of handcrafted design, careful planning, and AI code.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we ran into was a way to get the rush and engagement of posting yourself on social media, while keeping the accessibility barrier low enough for those with social anxiety. Our solution was making a carefully tuned vocal analysis coach for tangible feedback, while giving anonymous posting of just audio and captions to the public. Allowing interaction though only emoji reactions is a simple, foolproof way to know real people are listening to your speaking practice, while being totally safe.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

An amazing UI (shoutout Elyse!!)
Vocal analysis with real value
Crazy dev speed

What we learned

Five hours of brainstorming was more than worth it, and in future hackathons, we'd be glad to take even longer. Everything was roadmapped, so we had the ability to just throw ourselves right at the problem afterwards.