Alarm Chat

went to another hackathon. this one was focused on voice agents. it was at the south park, san francisco and around 100 ish people showed up. lots of teams building different voice ai applications. some were interesting, some were obvious, most were somewhere in between. i teamed with a software engineer, works at meta in the bay area, we worked on alarm chat. something i've been thinking about on and off for a while. thought this was a good chance to actually build it. the idea is simple. your alarm talks to you as you're waking up. not just beeping. actually having a conversation with you. it could tell you about your schedule, the news, any research topics you've been diving into. it could read your diary entries, your notes, talk about what's happening on your social media. whatever you need to hear in the morning. the whole point is, you get up better when you're starting a conversation. it's kinda how my dad used to wake me up when i was a kid. gentle conversation instead of jarring noise. and you become more aware of what's going on around you right from the moment you wake up. i've been thinking about voice agents for a while now, and after seeing what people built, i think they fall into two categories. one, human-triggered. you press a button, activate the ai, it does its thing. pretty straightforward. two, automation-triggered. the ai activates itself based on some condition. time-based, like calling you every morning. or event-based, like triggering a call after someone fills out a form. saw a few interesting projects. one team remade podcasts to take in listener questions. basically, the ai recreates the podcast episode, becomes the host, and pauses whenever the listener has a question. answers it, then continues. makes podcasts interactive instead of just passive listening. another one was called the 5 minute chat. an ai calls you twice a day. morning and night. talks to you about your day for 5 to 10 minutes. it remembers previous conversations, builds context over time. not just a one-off thing. but here's what i noticed. pretty much every voice agent needs some context or task or question to work with. it needs a reason to activate. patience is key when dealing with these. you have to wait for the ai to process, respond, work through the conversation. about the judging. i'm noticing a pattern at these hackathons. the judges aren't looking for professional-grade, complex systems. it's surprisingly lean. simple, often obvious ideas tend to win. the ones that just work and are easy to understand. so when you try building something very complex, you usually can't finish it in time. better to pick something simple that you already understand well.