In December 2025 I competed in the ElevenLabs × Project Europe hackathon in Warsaw, a focused 20-hour sprint built around voice AI, agents, and rapid product development.
🛠 What the Hackathon Was About
Selected teams from across Europe built working products with ElevenLabs voice technology under a short deadline. That format forced us to narrow the concept quickly, identify the riskiest technical path, and keep the demo working while the product changed.
🚀 Our Project
We focused on an AI‑enhanced voice‑powered assistant tailored for creative workflows:
- Uses ElevenLabs voice models for expressive output
- Real‑time audio data pipelines
- Integrated NLP idea exploration features
Getting this early AI work demoed under time pressure taught us a lot about practical teams vs theory.
🏆 Results & Reflection
Our team placed in the Top 10. More importantly, the event changed how I think about voice interfaces: latency, interruption, tone, and recovery matter as much as model quality when a user experiences the system as a conversation.
The strongest lesson was that a hackathon prototype still needs a clear product loop. A technically impressive pipeline is not enough if the demo cannot show who it helps, what happens first, and why voice is the right interface.