Lessons Learned
What Can a Company Learn by Co-organizing an AI Hackathon?
A few tips that will help you impress during your first hackathon
At PromethistAI, we provide easy to use low-code visual development tools to support creative people in building rich and personalized voice-first conversational AI applications. We were happy to be a part of the AI hackathon Robothon because we could use it as an opportunity to test our ideas and technology on real users. We want to share our experience from participating in a hackathon with you, mainly regarding what it takes to be a company co-organizing a hackathon and what we learned from it.
We want to share with you what it takes to be a company co-organizing a hackathon.
Robothon was an online hackathon focused on artificial intelligence that took place in Prague. The event celebrated the 100th anniversary of the word robot first being used in Karel Čapek’s world-renowned theatre play R.U.R. More than 150 hackers participated and they developed 16 new intriguing ideas using artificial intelligence solving problems in areas like ‘caring for the lonely,’ ‘AI and law,’ or ‘AI as a solution to the crisis.’ The high number of participants is clear proof that Prague is a blooming center of AI. Our company was covering the challenge called ‘caring for the lonely.’
How to Prepare For a Hackathon?
You have to consider several essential things before deciding to be part of a hackathon organization team and prepare for it. Here are the points we think can be useful for you.
Set Your Goals
Setting your goals is the answer to the ‘Why?’ of you wanting to participate in the hackathon organization. Although you don’t need to pay for it, it isn’t completely free. You will have to spend your time on preparation. Thus, you must know what you want to get out of that opportunity. The reasons will differ depending on your mission and at what stage you as a company are. So, it is crucial to think about it and come up with your reasoning.
Nevertheless, to give you a few examples, the reason to participate can be to support and expand the local development community, to learn more about people interested in your mission, or simply to look for talents. Only when you find the ‘Why’ you will not waste your time on the next steps.
Prepare a Quick Start Guide
It is a good idea to offer the tools you use or develop. However, this alone is not enough. It would be best for you to do your homework before deciding to let people embrace their creativity using your tools. Thus, you should answer the ‘How?’ of the hackers using your tools and what you should prepare in advance for them to succeed. There is probably nothing more demoralizing than seeing initially passionate people spending their free time trying to hack a new idea, gradually becoming more and more discouraged because a tool you offered doesn’t work as expected.
Ensure that you prepare a quick start guide that aids the hackers’ swift onboarding, tips that explain the fundamental notions, or even schedule a brief tutorial lecture that would offer the hackers some space for discussion. Make sure that everything functions as it should at least two times by two different people before the hackathon starts. This last point is even more critical if you let the hackers experiment with new features or tools you develop.
For us, it meant to prepare a quick start guide with images and animations that explained how to develop a new voice app smoothly and quickly.
Give Inspiration
It is vital to give an initial inspiration to the hackers. That can be examples of work that someone has already created using your tools or hypothetical assignments that the hackers can solve. The core idea is that it should answer the ‘What?’ of what can be accomplished by the hackers who decide to use your tools. A good inspiration significantly raises the chances that the hackers will choose to experiment with your tools.
A good inspiration significantly raises the chances that the hackers will decide to experiment with your tools.
We offered two voice applications as inspiration for the hackers. The first was the socialbot Lindia, and the second was Poppy, the AI therapist. We created both of those voice applications internally using our platform. Both were also close to the topic of ‘caring for the lonely’, which we arranged for the hackathon.
Offer Mentorship
A significant part of hackers participates in the hackathon to learn and try new things. So, you can expect them to have a lot of questions. That’s why you should consider assigning a part of your team to be the hackathon’s mentors. They will have a unique chance to directly interact with hackers, help them, and identify your tools’ possible improvements. The interaction is also an enormous opportunity to broaden the community of creative and passionate people interested in your mission. We urge you to not skip this point because you “already prepared a good tutorial.”
We decided to have four mentors supporting the teams. Two mentors were conversational UX designers. Their role was to help the teams design the voice interaction. The other two mentors were developers who were ready to assist with any technical questions the teams had. As the Robothon took place online, we made several video calls with teams in which we offered our guidance enabling them to succeed. We also made sure that at least one mentor was available during the whole event, with the exception of a small window of time between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m. This worked well for both the teams and our mentors.
What Were Our Goals and What Did We Learn?
We want to share with you the reasons why we decided to co-organize the hackathon. This section might serve as an inspiration for you as to why it is beneficial to participate in such an event.
We took the hackathon as an unconventional opportunity to perform yet another round of tests that evaluated several vital aspects. We decided to investigate the following points.
Is Our Platform Easy to Use?
One of our goals is to make the development of conversational AI, voice bots, and AI personas accessible to a wide range of people. Today, there are tools available for the development of chatbots. However, you usually have to use code to create even the simplest of chatbots. This obstacle leaves many people who don’t know how to code behind. Therefore, our primary objective was to verify whether our platform for developing conversational AI is easy to use for people outside of our team.
One of the teams participating in our challenge was Fountie, who wanted to develop an app connecting seniors with the younger generation. They believe the elderly would quickly learn to work with the new technology due to its being voice-based, which is a natural interface for them, and so the team considered it one of the biggest advantages of our platform. Their project was highly aligned with our goals and beliefs.
“I have heard a lot about the recent advances in artificial intelligence, so it was a great feeling that I was able to develop and interact with my own AI thanks to your platform.”
The team didn’t have any programmers but that didn’t stop them. They quickly grasped the main concepts of our platform, and they were able to work independently on their vision. We asked for their feedback after the event. They were generally happy with how they materialized their project quickly. One of Fountie’s members also told us: “I have heard a lot about the recent advances in artificial intelligence, so it was a great feeling that I was able to develop and interact with my own AI thanks to your platform.”
How Can We Help Users to Onboard?
Our platform offers many features and Robothon proved to be an accurate benchmark for validating that we can teach new users how to use it. We were prepared to provide help in several forms to ensure that the hackers wouldn’t be discouraged because of some obstacles in their way they didn’t know how to overcome. We also had a quick start guide, conducted a short tutorial session, and we had four mentors ready to assist the hackers.
We learned that most of the questions the mentors had answered were concerning the best practices in developing the voice app. We responded to questions like “How do you structure the conversation?”, “What is the best question to ask at the start of a conversation?” or “How can we ask about the user’s hobbies?” The character of the questions suggests that it is essential for us to create more voice and conversational UX guides.
How Much Time Does It Take to Create a Voice App Using Our Platform?
We wanted to evaluate how much time it takes for newcomers to have something solid in their hands. What would be our platform suitable for if you needed a programmer and a week to create an initial prototype?
Fountie’s goal was to develop a tool that would connect seniors with the younger generation via a voice app. Their vision was that the voice app would ask seniors for their skills and hobbies, and it would match them with a young adult interested in learning their craft. The app would then match a grandma who can bake with a young adult who is just at the beginning of the journey to baking the best cake, for example — what a noble goal.
Team Fountie developed a voice app connecting seniors with the young generation in 24 hours.
Such use-case meant that the voice app has to support a multiturn conversation with branching flow. It had to understand and remember seniors’ hobbies and skills and later use that data for the matching process. The team also wanted to present mock-ups of their planned application during the conversation and demo it on a wide range of devices; all of that without a programmer on their team. That is a challenging task for all conventional online chatbot development tools, even if their users know how to code.
Nevertheless, they created a voice app in a tight time frame of the hackathon’s 24 hours that remembers seniors’ hobbies in their profile, displays mock-ups as a part of the conversation, and runs on mobile phones and a web client thanks to our platform. It was amazing to see what they were able to create in such a short time.
Conclusion
If you ever have an opportunity to co-organize a hackathon, prepare well and go for it! It is an exclusive chance to interact with passionate people interested in your mission. And the best thing is that you can learn a lot from them, and they can learn a lot from you. We hope this article can help you be prepared and make the most out of such an opportunity.
