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<\/a><\/p>\nTinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spoof…<\/h3>\n
To get inside, Agent Luke has hatched a plan. He’s going to masquerade as Chris Nemesis’ out of town childhood best friend who’s come to stay over for a couple of days. It’s a bold move, and it’s going to take more than some fast talking. To really seal the deal, our Agent wants to play the door guards a recording of himself chatting with Chris. A convo that “proves” they go way back, and that Chris expects Luke to be let in without a fuss. Or else.<\/p>\n
That’s where you come in. Like a tech genius in a movie franchise we can’t name because they might sue us, Agent Luke needs your skills to create a convincingly natural, spontaneous-sounding conversation between him and Chris.<\/p>\n
As in any good spy thriller, there’s a perfect window of opportunity. At midnight on Wednesday 30th of September, Chris will be on a plane home. No phone signal. No way for the guards to call and check whether our man is the real deal or a clever spoof. They’ll only have this recording to go on. And that’s the HackaCon submission deadline.<\/p>\n
The Task<\/h2>\n
So what does this recording of the-call-that-never-really-happened need to consist of? There are five parameters:<\/p>\n
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- The voices should sound as much like Agent Luke and Chris Nemesis as possible<\/strong>. But what do they sound like? Luckily a journalist recently managed to record herself interviewing both men. After you register, we’ll give you access to these reference samples to work from. Forensic speech scientists and audio-engineers? This should be your thing.<\/li>\n
- The conversation should sound as naturally human-like and spontaneous as possible<\/strong>. No canned Friends dialogue or Radio 4 melodrama. We need something that would pass as a genuine, real-life interaction. Linguists and creative types? This one’s for you.<\/li>\n
- Chris needs to say something for the benefit of the door guards, Alex and Sam, that urges them to let Luke into the Nemesis Nightclub<\/strong>.<\/li>\n
- At some point in the conversation, Luke needs to make reference to something from their supposedly shared childhood<\/strong>. We’re going to leave the details of that entirely up to you. Be as creative as you like, but don’t forget that this call needs to sound highly plausible. Psychologists and social engineering researchers? This is your moment.<\/li>\n
- The file size limit is 100mb<\/strong>. For reference, a typical three-minute song is about 3-4mb in MP3 format, and about 30-40mb in WAV format. And this might naturally lead you to ask…<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
How long should my recording be?<\/h1>\n
Well, that’s the \u00a3600 question, as it were. Or at least one of them. The answer is… complicated. Based on our experience, we think an optimal window is somewhere within the 45 to 90 seconds range. However<\/em>, this is subjective. We may be blown away by a submission that’s shorter or possibly even longer than this. What we would say is that the longer it is, the more opportunities there are for the voice similarity and\/or the naturalness to fall apart (see 1 and 2 above), but equally, if you try to make it very short, you’ll struggle to get in the required content (see 3 and 4 above), and this may also affect the naturalness too. In different words, there’s no set limit, but we suspect that stronger submissions are likely to be somewhere a little below or above one minute in length.<\/p>\n
How should I go about this challenge?<\/h1>\n
Indeed, how should this conversation start and end? How will you make your voices sound like Chris and Luke? Should you AI everything from speech to dialogue? Should you take a more eclectic approach? Will you throw in extra creative flair to make it sound more authentic?<\/p>\n
We think the best person to make all of these decisions (and more) is you.<\/p>\n
- The conversation should sound as naturally human-like and spontaneous as possible<\/strong>. No canned Friends dialogue or Radio 4 melodrama. We need something that would pass as a genuine, real-life interaction. Linguists and creative types? This one’s for you.<\/li>\n