Handbook - AI Tinkerers - New York City Hackathon
AI Tinkerers - New York City
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AI Tinkerers - New York City Hackathon

Handbook for the AI Tinkerers - New York City Hackathon hackathon.

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Handbook

Welcome to the Emotionally Intelligent AI Hackathon!

This event is all about building the emotional layer for voice AI. We’re moving beyond basic chatbots and TTS demos to create systems that truly understand and respond to human emotion.

Your Mission:
Build a focused, production-shaped system that detects emotional signals from user input and changes what happens next. This could be a voice agent, text workflow, multimodal interaction, evaluation harness, guardrail, simulation tool, or creative experience.

Key Principles:

  • Focus: Pick one use case, one emotional signal, and one behavior change.
  • Actionable AI: Make your AI “read the room” and prove it changed its behavior because of what it heard.
  • Demo-Ready: Bring a demo that works end-to-end. Reliability wins.

What We’re NOT Doing:

  • Chatbot wrappers.
  • “Plug in an LLM and call it an agent.”
  • Slide decks.
  • Hand-waving about “empathetic AI.”

Project Ideas to Spark Your Creativity:

  • Emotion-Aware Voice Agents: Agents that adapt in real-time to caller emotion (tone, pacing, word choice, escalation strategy).
  • Emotion Detection & Evaluation Pipelines: Systems that classify emotional state from raw voice input and benchmark accuracy.
  • Voice Guardrails & Safety: Tools that detect escalation, distress, or manipulation and intervene.
  • Multilingual Emotion Transfer: Systems that preserve emotional nuance across languages.
  • Emotional Voice Avatars: AI personas with voice profiles that convey empathy, authority, or calm.
  • Creative Expression Engines: Systems that generate emotionally dynamic voice performances for storytelling, gaming, or entertainment.

Leverage Our Sponsors:
You’ll have access to leading voice AI APIs and tools from our sponsors, including:

  • ElevenLabs: For high-quality, expressive TTS and voice cloning. Follow the instructions below to receive ElevenLabs Credits:
  1. Join the Discord server: https://discord.com/invite/VnBvbbcdEC
  2. Gain access to the #🎟️│coupon-codes channel
  3. Click “Start Redemption”
  4. Select the event and fill out the form using the email used for registration
  5. The bot sends the unique coupon code
  • Tavus: For human-like AI interaction and emotional response. Get resources from Tavus for the hackathon here
  • Redis: For fast in-memory data storage and vector search.
  • Veris AI: For agent development simulation and testing.
  • HPE: For enterprise-grade infrastructure and private cloud AI solutions.

Explore their documentation and APIs to power your projects.

Submission Deadline:
6:00pm!

Let’s build the future of emotionally intelligent AI!