--- title: I Stayed for 36 Hours Straight. Here Is Why description: I attended AI Hackathon @ Berkeley 2026 representing Deepgram and did not sleep. It was not required. I could not bring myself to leave. --- # [I Stayed for 36 Hours Straight. Here Is Why](https://mktg.nhcarrigan.com/blog/ai-hackathon-berkeley-2026) Written by [Naomi Carrigan](https://mktg.nhcarrigan.com/blog/author/naomi) | Jun 24, 2026, 12:00:00 PM I attended AI Hackathon @ Berkeley 2026 representing Deepgram, and I did not sleep. I did not have to stay awake. I could not bring myself to leave. I was there for all of it: the sponsor booth, the workshop, the judging and the full 36 hours. I want to be direct about why. The reason was the people. The hackers at Berkeley were some of the most enthusiastic builders I have been around. They were not only building. They wanted to talk, and they wanted to show me what they were making. They had questions at 2am, at 4am and at 6am, and they did not care what time it was. That is not an energy I could walk away from. ## What We Were There For Deepgram sponsored the Best Use of Deepgram track. The track asked teams to build real-time voice into their projects as an essential part, not an afterthought. Out of 398 total projects, 141 teams did this. That is 35% of the hackathon building voice-first. I knew beforehand that voice is a difficult integration. It cannot simply be added at the end. Even so, team after team came to our booth. They told me what they were building, how they were using the API, what was working and where they were stuck. I had those conversations all night. No metric captures one part of this: the look on someone's face when their real-time transcription works for the first time. ## How I Showed Up I think much of why this event felt different came from a choice I made before I arrived. I decided to do more than is usual for a sponsor. We set up a monitor at the booth with QR codes. I ran a workshop. I was the only sponsor who stayed all night. While everyone else went home, I stayed. At 2am, people were doing push-ups in the aisles to stay awake. By 6am, there were hackers asleep on the floor next to my booth. I was still standing, so I was still having conversations. They were real conversations about what people were building, what was working, what they were stuck on and what they wanted to do next. Two figures reflect this. There were 243 workshop signups from a room of 50 people. There were 42 people who personally invited me to see their project in our sponsor Slack channel. Both followed from my being present throughout the event. ## Judging There were 141 submissions in our track and a two-hour judging window. I walked the floor and visited as many as I could of the teams that had contacted me personally. While I walked, other teams saw me and called me over to their tables. The whole floor was in motion. When the window closed and I submitted my winner, people began lining up at the booth. For another 90 minutes, team after team came to show me what they had built with Deepgram and to talk about what came next. No one was aggressive. Everyone was polite. They wanted to talk about the API, their project and where it was going. That is rare at a sponsored event. The team behind aside.ai won our track. The reason was not the two-hour judging window. It was the 24 hours before it. They had been in conversation with me for the entire event. They showed me their work, iterated and checked back in. By the time I submitted the winner, I had watched them build the project. ## The Projects The range of what people built was very wide. I want to be specific about that. Every hackathon recap mentions a variety of projects, and most do not mean it in the way I mean it. voxaid is a speech pipeline fine-tuned for dysarthric speech. It is intended for people with ALS, cerebral palsy and stroke, whose voices existing recognition software does not understand. The team fine-tuned a wav2vec2 model on the TORGO dysarthric speech dataset. They used an architecture from a paper published two days before the hackathon started. They then passed the output through Claude for semantic reconstruction and Deepgram Aura for voice response. The result was a full speech-to-speech system that could take unclear input and produce natural output. It is intended for people who currently depend on a human interpreter to communicate. It was built at a hackathon. aintercept is a scam interception tool. It listens on a call and alerts someone as soon as it detects the patterns of a scam in progress. The builder's grandmother had fallen for a fake police officer scam the year before. They explained to me exactly what had happened, and then they showed me what they had built. Those two conversations were about thirty seconds apart. crisisroom was built by a veteran who served on a landing ship in Singapore. He described damage control at sea. There is a steel passageway with strobing lights and smoke filling the space. Water rises past your boots. A general alarm is so loud that you cannot hear the person next to you. A grease pencil on a plexiglass board is the only shared source of truth for everyone making life-or-death decisions. He built a real-time, voice-powered incident response system because he had lived with the cost of not having one. The problem statement he gave me at the booth was one of the most striking things I heard all weekend. moggie is a portable party-game kiosk running on a Raspberry Pi. Players compete in facial expression matching and hand-motion challenges, with Deepgram powering the social and voice layer. It was built as a response to looksmaxxing culture. The hypothesis is that if people laugh and compete together in person over topics they would otherwise obsess over alone, something changes. It was also chaotic and enjoyable, to the point that I forgot I was 18 hours into a hackathon. séance lets you point your phone at any object. The object becomes a character and talks back to you. You can argue with your water bottle, or have a stapler answer back. I will not claim this solved a critical global problem. It was one of the most enjoyable things I saw all weekend, and the group of people around it was always laughing. The last project was aside.ai. The team behind aside.ai won our track and deserved to. Their project was a clip-on wearable. A Raspberry Pi camera streamed frames over Wi-Fi to a laptop. The laptop used Claude for vision and Deepgram for both speech-to-text and text-to-speech. It narrated the world around the wearer in real time, in a personality of their choice, such as a hype man, a goth therapist or an epic quest narrator. The same moment was described differently depending on the personality chosen. The project was technically strong and funny, and the team had clearly thought hard about both. What stayed with me about aside.ai was not only the project but the team. They were at my booth constantly. They were not asking for help. They were showing me things and iterating. At one point I noticed that the booth next to mine had been empty for the entire event. Someone from their team was now sitting there, editing and publishing social media content in real time to build interest in what they were making. They had not only built a startup. They had shipped a startup. At a hackathon. ## The Workshop We ran a workshop during the event with about 50 people in the room. The links we handed out produced 243 console signups. That is nearly five times the number of people who were physically present. The resources spread across the whole 398-project event, and I watched it happen in real time from the booth. Links appeared in Discord servers, were added to READMEs and were passed between teams who had never attended the session. ## What I Am Taking Away I have been to many events. Berkeley felt different. The students there were not only looking for a prize. They were building things they were excited about, and they wanted to talk to the people behind the tools they were using. That is rare. I stayed for 36 hours because the room kept giving me reasons to stay. I would do it again without hesitation. 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