{"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":"2026-05-27T20:04:05","modified_gmt":"2026-05-27T20:04:05","slug":"home","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/hackacon\/","title":{"rendered":"Home"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Like most of our projects, the question behind HackaCon is simple:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>Can we use AI to convincingly synthesise a natural, spontaneous-sounding human conversation between two specific speakers?<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>No really. That&#8217;s it. So we&#8217;re running this conversation hackathon &#8211; a competition to find out the state-of-the-art of AI-generated conversation. <strong>To play, you need to <a href=\"\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/hackacon\/register\/\">register<\/a><\/strong>, and if you top the leaderboard, <strong>there&#8217;s a <a href=\"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/hackacon\/challenge\/prizes\/\">prize<\/a>\u00a0in it for you<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>You might think, &#8220;That&#8217;s ridiculous&#8230; We already have speech synthesis. We even have conversational AI. This will be <em>easy!<\/em>&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>But it very much isn&#8217;t. <a href=\"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/hackacon\/home\/why-hackacon\/\">Allow us to convince you<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>If you already know how tough this could be and you&#8217;re up for it, jump directly to <a href=\"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/hackacon\/challenge\/\">The Challenge<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;s it. So we&#8217;re running this conversation hackathon &#8211; a competition to find out the state-of-the-art of AI-generated conversation. To play, you need to register, and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":77,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"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":18,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/hackacon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":225,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/hackacon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2\/revisions\/225"}],"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}]}}