i went to ai hackathon @ berkeley 2026 representing deepgram and i did not sleep. not because i had to because i genuinely could not make myself leave~
i was there for all of it. the sponsor booth the workshop the judging the full 36 hours. and i want to be honest about why: the people. the hackers at berkeley were some of the most excited passionate relentlessly enthusiastic builders i have ever been around. they were not just building they were hyped. they wanted to talk. they wanted to show me what they were making. they had questions at 2am and at 4am and at 6am and they did not care what time it was~
that energy is not something you walk away from~
what we were there for
deepgram sponsored the best use of deepgram track which asked teams to build real-time voice into their projects not as an afterthought but as something essential. out of 398 total projects 141 teams did exactly that. 35% of the entire hackathon chose to build voice-first~
i knew going in that voice is a hard integration. you cannot just bolt it on. and yet team after team came to our booth to tell me what they were building how they were using the api what was working and what they were stuck on. i had those conversations all night long~
that is the part no metric captures: the look on someone's face when their real-time transcription just works for the first time~
how i showed up
i want to be honest about something: i think a lot of why this event felt different came down to a choice i made before i got there. i was going to go over the top~
we set up a monitor at the booth with qr codes. i ran a workshop. and i was the only sponsor who stayed all night~
while everyone else went home i was still there. at 2am people were doing pushups in the aisles to stay awake. by 6am there were hackers asleep on the floor next to my booth. i was still standing. and because i was still standing i was still having conversations real ones about what people were building what was working what they were stuck on what they wanted to do next~
that is what the 243 workshop signups from a 50-person room reflects. that is what the 42 people who personally invited me to come see their project in our sponsor slack reflects. presence compounds~
judging
with 141 submissions in our track and a two-hour judging window i walked the floor and hit as many of the teams who had personally reached out to me as i could. while i was walking other teams spotted me and pulled me over to their tables. the whole floor was in motion~
when the window closed and i submitted my winner people started lining up at the booth. for another 90 minutes team after team came to show me what they had built with deepgram and talk about what came next. no one was aggressive about it. everyone was gracious. they just genuinely wanted to talk about the api about their project about where it was going. that is a rare thing at a sponsored event and i did not take it for granted~
aside.ai won our track but the honest reason they won was not the two-hour judging window. it was the 24 hours before it. they had been in conversation with me the entire event showing me things iterating checking back in. by the time i submitted the winner i had watched them build. that is a different kind of knowing~
the projects
the range of what people built was genuinely staggering and i want to be specific about that because "variety of projects" is something every hackathon recap says and most of them do not mean it the way i mean it~
there was voxaid a speech pipeline fine-tuned specifically for dysarthric speech for people with als and cerebral palsy and stroke whose voices existing recognition software simply does not understand. they fine-tuned a wav2vec2 model on the torgo dysarthric speech dataset using an architecture from a paper published two days before the hackathon started then piped the output through claude for semantic reconstruction and deepgram aura for voice response. the result was a full speech-to-speech system that could take unclear input and produce natural output. for people who currently depend on a human interpreter to communicate. at a hackathon~
there was aintercept a scam interception tool that listens on a call and alerts someone the moment it detects the patterns of a scam in progress. the builder's grandmother had fallen for a fake police officer scam the year before. they walked me through exactly what happened and then they showed me what they built. those two conversations were about thirty seconds apart~
there was crisisroom built by a veteran who served on a landing ship in singapore. he described damage control at sea: a steel passageway lights strobing smoke filling the space water rising past your boots a general alarm so loud you cannot hear the person next to you and a grease pencil on a plexiglass board as the only shared source of truth for everyone making life-or-death decisions. he built a real-time voice-powered incident response system because he had lived the cost of not having one. the problem statement he gave me standing at the booth was one of the most visceral things i heard all weekend~
there was moggie a portable party-game kiosk running on a raspberry pi where players compete in facial expression matching and hand-motion challenges with deepgram powering the social and voice layer. it was built as a response to looksmaxxing culture: the hypothesis being that if you get people laughing and competing together in person over the topics they'd otherwise obsess over alone something shifts. it was also genuinely chaotically fun in the way that makes you forget you're 18 hours into a hackathon~
there was séance point your phone at any object and it wakes up as a character and talks back to you. argue with your water bottle. get sass from a stapler. i am not going to pretend this was solving a critical global problem. it was one of the most joyful things i saw all weekend and the cluster of people around it was always laughing~
and then there was aside.ai~
aside won our track and they deserved it. their project was a clip-on wearable a raspberry pi camera streaming frames over wi-fi to a laptop which used claude for vision and deepgram for both speech-to-text and text-to-speech narrating the world around you in real time in whatever personality you chose. hype man. goth therapist. epic quest narrator. the same moment completely different depending on the vibe. it was technically sharp genuinely funny and the team had clearly been thinking hard about both~
what stuck with me about aside was not just the project it was the team. they were at my booth constantly. not asking for help showing me things. iterating. and at some point i looked over and noticed that the booth next to mine which had been empty the entire event now had someone from their team sitting there editing and publishing social media content in real time to drive interest in what they were building. they had not just built a startup. they had shipped a startup. at a hackathon~
the workshop
we ran a workshop during the event about 50 people in the room. the links we handed out logged 243 console signups. nearly five times the people who were physically there. the resources travelled across the whole 398-team event and i got to watch it happen in real time from the booth links showing up in discord servers folded into readmes passed between teams who had never come to the session itself~
what i'm taking away
i have been to a lot of events. berkeley felt different. the students there were not just looking for a prize they were genuinely building things they were excited about and they wanted to talk to the people behind the tools they were using. that is a rare thing~
i stayed for 36 hours because the room kept giving me reasons to stay. i would do it again without hesitation~
