</speechmax>
</the problem>
Speech therapy is boring and people drop off. 77% of people have public speaking anxiety but professional coaching costs $200/hour. Only 8% ever seek help. Existing tools are clinical and feel like homework, not something people stick with.
</my approach>
Built a Duolingo-style progression system with real clinical speech therapy methods. Real-time webcam analysis using MediaPipe for eye contact and posture, Web Speech API for transcription, and Web Audio API for pitch detection. All processing runs client-side for privacy. Designed five targeted mini-games that each isolate a specific weakness.
</key features>
Real-time webcam analysis
468 facial landmarks for eye contact tracking, 33 body keypoints for posture and fidget detection, all running at 30+ FPS client-side.
Five gamified training modes
Filler Ninja, Eye Lock, Pace Racer, Pitch Surfer, and Stage Presence. Each targets a specific weakness with progressive difficulty.
AI coaching with Mike
Gemini 2.5 Flash powered coach that sees your scores and game history, giving short actionable advice.
Radar scan scoring
30-second assessment across five axes calibrated against Toastmasters evaluation criteria.
</what i learned>
Balancing fun game feel with genuine therapeutic value requires grounding gamification in real clinical research (deliberate practice, Ericsson 2008).
Building under 48-hour pressure forces ruthless prioritization. We cut features that felt important but weren't essential to the core loop.
Client-side ML inference eliminates privacy concerns entirely, which matters deeply for something as personal as speech coaching.