{"id":2,"date":"2026-01-01T00:00:05","date_gmt":"2026-01-01T00:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/hackacon\/?page_id=2"},"modified":"2026-04-02T23:21:46","modified_gmt":"2026-04-02T23:21:46","slug":"home","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/hackacon\/","title":{"rendered":"Home"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

Like most of our projects, the question behind HackaCon is simple:<\/p>\r\n

\r\n

Can we use AI to convincingly synthesise a natural, spontaneous-sounding human conversation between two specific speakers?<\/strong><\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

No really. That’s it. So we’re running this conversation hackathon – a competition to find out the state-of-the-art of AI-generated conversation. And if you top the leaderboard, there’s a prize in it for you<\/strong>. (Nothing enormous, we’re not made of money, but we do have some nice goodie bags and lots of glory to heap on the best contenders.)<\/p>\r\n

You might think, “That’s ridiculous… Human conversation is so basic. This will be easy!<\/em>“<\/p>\r\n

But it very much isn’t. Allow us to convince you<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n

If you already know how tough this could be and you’re up for it, jump directly to The Challenge<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like most of our projects, the question behind HackaCon is simple: Can we use AI to convincingly synthesise a natural, spontaneous-sounding human conversation between two specific speakers? No really. That’s it. So we’re running this conversation hackathon – a competition to find out the state-of-the-art of AI-generated conversation. And if you top the leaderboard, there’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":77,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/hackacon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/hackacon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/hackacon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/hackacon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/77"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/hackacon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/hackacon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/hackacon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2\/revisions\/101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/hackacon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}