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AssemblyAI Voice Agents Challenge AssemblyAI Voice Agents Challenge

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AssemblyAI Voice Agents Challenge

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Innovate with ultra fast, ultra accurate streaming speech-to-text.

Challenge Status: Live Ended
Submissions Due: July 27, 2025 23:59 PT

We are so excited to bring the community our next challenge with AssemblyAI.

Running through July 27, the AssemblyAI Voice Agents is all about building with Universal-Streaming, AssemblyAI's most advanced real-time transcription API. Universal-Streaming is ultra fast (300ms latency!), ultra accurate, and offers intelligent endpointing to keep conversations flowing naturally.

Prizes

There are three distinct prompts for this challenge, with three opportunities to win. Each winner will receive:

AssemblyAI Credits

Sign up for AssemblyAI to get your free API key. There is no credit card required and AssemblyAI provides $50 worth of credits for new users, which should be sufficient for most challenge projects.

Need Help?

Join the AssemblyAI Slack Community for support from the Applied AI team! Challenge participants can ask API questions and connect with other developers.

Get familiar with AssemblyAI's capabilities:

We can't wait to see what you build with this transformative technology! Check out the three prompts below.

Key Dates

  • Contest start: July 16, 2025
  • Submissions due: July 27, 2025
  • Winners announced: August 07, 2025

Badge Rewards

AssemblyAI Challenge Winner Badge
AssemblyAI Challenge Winner Badge
AssemblyAI Challenge Completion Badge
AssemblyAI Challenge Completion Badge

Sponsored by AssemblyAI

AssemblyAI provides the market's most comprehensive Speech AI toolkit through a single, powerful API. Our industry-leading models, including the groundbreaking Universal-Streaming, deliver superhuman speech-to-text accuracy with real-time capabilities. Advanced features like speaker detection, PII redaction, sentiment analysis, and content summarization transform audio into actionable insights for developers building the future of voice-enabled applications.

Challenge Prompts

Business Automation Voice Agent

Build a voice agent that automates real business processes - sales calls, customer support, appointment scheduling, lead qualification, etc. Showcase Universal-Streaming's accuracy in professional contexts with proper nouns, business terminology, and multi-step workflows. Focus on practical B2B/B2C applications that could actually be deployed.

Submission Template

Judging Criteria:

  • Use of Underlying technology
  • Usability and User Experience
  • Accessibility
  • Creativity

Real-Time Voice Performance

Create the fastest, most responsive voice experience possible using Universal-Streaming. Build an application where sub-300ms latency matters - voice-controlled interfaces, gaming, live translation, instant commands. Demonstrate technical optimization, performance benchmarking, and creative speed-dependent use cases.

Submission Template

Judging Criteria:

  • Use of Underlying technology
  • Usability and User Experience
  • Accessibility
  • Creativity

Domain Expert Voice Agent

Build a specialized voice agent with deep domain knowledge that can learn and improve from conversations. Focus on expertise in specific fields (legal, medical, technical support, education, etc.) and incorporate RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) or conversation learning capabilities. Demonstrate how Universal-Streaming enables accurate domain-specific terminology recognition.

Submission Template

Judging Criteria:

  • Use of Underlying technology
  • Usability and User Experience
  • Accessibility
  • Creativity

Frequently Asked Questions

Participation

Can I submit to multiple prompts?

Yes, you are welcome to submit to multiple prompts.

Can one submission qualify for multiple prompts?

Yes, if your submission offers a solution to multiple prompts, it can qualify for multiple prompts.

Can I submit to a prompt more than once?

Yes, you can submit multiple submissions per prompt but you’ll need to publish a separate post for each submission.

  • In the event that you may win two or more prompts, and your submission is very close with another participant, we will favor the other participant.
  • In the event that you do win two or more prompts, you will only receive one winner badge.

Can I work on a team?

Yes, you can work on teams of up to four people.

  • If you collaborate with anyone, you’ll need to list their DEV handles in your submission post so we can award a badge to your entire team! Please only publish one submission per team.
  • DEV does not handle prize-splitting, so in the event that your submission wins the shop gift, you will need to split that amongst yourselves. Thank you for understanding!

How old do I have to be to participate?

Participants need to be 18+ in order to participate.

If I live in X, am I eligible to participate?

For eligibility rules, see our official challenge rules.

Submission

Can my submission include open source code?

Riffing on open source code and borrowing and improving on previous work/ideas is encouraged but it’s important your changes are significant enough to ensure your submission is valid.

When does riffing become plagiarism?

It will depend, but transparency is important, license compatibility is important. You can use someone else’s code to give you a jumpstart to demonstrate your ideas on top of someone else’s base, but not just re-package the base. It should be clear to the judges what you added to the project in terms of the code and conceptual inspiration. This means, you should clearly state what you were building on and what elements are original to this new submission. When building on existing code, we expect a significant change that adds something tangible to the output. i.e. a new animation, and new sprite, a new function, a new presentation. Not just changes to the source - i.e. changing colours, changing one sprite, changing one function.

What happens if my submission is considered plagiarized or invalid?

Anything deemed to be plagiarism will not be eligible for prizes. Incidental plagiarism may simply result in your disqualification from the challenge (regardless of the number of other valid submissions you have published). Egregious plagiarism will result in your suspension from DEV entirely. Any non-generic, non-trivial usage of prior work, including open source code must be credited in your submission.

Do submissions have to be in English?

Non-english submissions are eligible for a completion badge but not eligible for prizes due to the current limitations of our judges. We will not be judging on mastery of the English language, so please don’t let this deter you from submitting if you are not a native English speaker! We hope to evolve this in the future to be more accommodating.

Do I need a license for my code?

You are not required to license your code but we strongly recommend that you do. Here are some you may consider: MIT, Apache, BSD-2, BSD-3, or Commons Clause.

Can I use AI?

Use of AI is allowed as long as all other rules are followed. We want to give you a chance to show off your skills in realistic scenarios. If you use AI tools to help you achieve your submission, all the power to you.

How do I embed my project directly into my DEV post?

Our editor supports many types of embeds, including: Stackbliz, Glitch, Github, etc. You can typically use the {% embed https://... %} syntax directly in the post. Click here for more information on our markdown support.

  • For CodePen, you will need to use this syntax: {% codepen http://... %}
  • For CodeSandbox, you will need to use this syntax: {% codesandbox http://... %}

Judging and Prizing

Can there be ties?

In the event of a tie in scoring between judges, the judges will select the entry that received the highest number of positive reactions on their DEV post to determine the winner.

How will I know if I won?

Winners will be announced in a DEV post on the winner announcement date noted in our key dates section.

When will I receive my DEV badge?

Both participation and winner badges will be awarded, in most cases, the same day as the winner announcement.

When will I receive my prizes?

The DEV Team will contact you via the email associated with your DEV profile within, at most, 10 business days of the announcement date to share the details of claiming your prizes.

What steps do I need to take to receive my cash prize?

The winner (including each member of a team) may be required to sign and return an affidavit of eligibility and publicity/liability release, and provide any additional tax filing information (such as a W-9, social security number or Federal tax ID number) within seven (7) business days following the date of your first email notification.

AssemblyAI Voice Agents Challenge Rules

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. Open only to 18+. Contest entry period ends July 27, 2025 at 11:59 PM PDT. Contest is void where prohibited or restricted by law or regulation. All entires must be submitted during the content period. For Official Rules, see AssemblyAI Challenge Contest Rules and General Contest Official Rules.