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Edition 02RecapVoice AI + Accessibility
Voice AI — New York.
Voice as the primary surface — not a feature, the product.
Presented by
- EElevenLabs
- OOpenAI
The challenge
Voice as the product, not the feature.
Build something where voice is the primary surface — input, output, or both. Bonus weight to projects that move accessibility forward for blind, low-vision, or motor-impaired users.
Constraints
- Voice must carry 80%+ of the interaction
- Must work for at least one accessibility scenario
- Open-source preferred (not required)
Deliverables
- 5-minute demo with someone actually using it
- Short write-up of accessibility tradeoffs
The prize
$0 pool. One winner.
Cash plus the doors that open behind it — investor intros, lab time, press, and lifetime access to the alumni network.
For every accepted applicant
- ElevenLabs enterprise credits
- OpenAI partnership review
- Vapi early access
Run of show
The weekend, hour by hour.
Friday, Nov 8
- 17:00
Check-in + brief
- 19:00
Hacking starts
- 17:00
Saturday, Nov 9
- 11:00
Workshop: ElevenLabs voice cloning
- 11:00
Sunday, Nov 10
- 13:00
Demos begin
- 18:30
Awards
- 13:00
Judges
Who's in the room with the scorecards.
Operators and researchers from the sponsor companies, plus independent voices from the field. Final say on awards.
Mati Stoner
Founding Designer · ElevenLabs
Reza Hadi
PM, Accessibility · Apple
Ana Ortiz
CTO · Vapi
Ben Hammersley
Editor · Wired
Sponsors
Made possible by these teams.
In the room hiring
These teams will be there with offers.
Hiring panels at every edition. The people whose work catches their eye get a follow-up the week after.
- ElevenLabs
- OpenAI
- Vapi
- Cartesia
Rules
The few we enforce.
- Teams of 1–4.
- No code before brief drops.
- Voice must be the primary surface.
Questions
The short answers.
Is this past event still useful?
See the recap and winner demos below.
Who won
The teams that shipped.
Scored on engineering quality, demo, originality, and impact. Three placements plus category prizes per edition.
Loom Reader
Ada Brennan · Junichi Saito · Wendy Park
Audio-first email triage for low-vision users
Inbox-as-podcast. The agent reads your morning email aloud, lets you reply by voice, and triages priority via tone-of-voice cues. Tested with three users from the National Federation of the Blind.
We built it for one user. By Sunday she was using it for real. That's all we needed to know.
Calltext
Marco Dell'Anno · Priya Khan
Live transcription overlay for video calls
A floating overlay that transcribes every speaker with sub-second latency, stays in your peripheral vision, and exports a structured transcript when the call ends.
From the venue
Photos.
This edition is closed.
See the winners and photos above, or check the next upcoming edition.
See the next edition