37.1822, FYI: HackaCon: The Conversation Hackathon

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-1822. Tue May 19 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.1822, FYI: HackaCon: The Conversation Hackathon

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Date: 18-May-2026
From: Professor Claire Hardaker [factor at lancaster.ac.uk]
Subject: HackaCon: The Conversation Hackathon


HackaCon is an interdisciplinary challenge exploring one of the
hardest problems in AI and interaction research: can AI generate a
“recording” of a convincingly natural-sounding conversation? Moreover,
can it make that conversation sound like it has happened between two
specific speakers – in our case, Agent Luke and Chris Nemesis – people
who have never interacted? And can it make them chat about specific
topics?
In different words, unlike conventional AI hackathons and generation
tasks, HackaCon is also about the interactional realities of spoken
conversation: overlaps, hesitations, backchannels, repair, timing,
repetition, alignment, disfluency, interpersonal dynamics, and
speaker-specific conversational style. In doing so, HackaCon moves
beyond the single metric of whether an AI-generated speech sample
“sounds human” in isolation to look at the more complex, multilayered
demands of whether two AI-generated voices can “sound human” when
undertaking the most “ordinary” of human interactions – a seemingly
casual chat between supposed friends. In doing so, we look to
establish current AI capabilities in this sphere, and what this means
for the present and future of identity, trust, and fraud.
The event seeks to engage researchers, students, developers,
professionals, and practitioners from across the spectrum – linguists,
conversation analysts, forensic linguists, and speech scientists of
course, but also those in AI, cybersecurity, computing, engineering,
the media and creative industries, psychology, social engineering,
defence, national security, and beyond.
Given the nature of this topic and its range of interest, it is
possible to enter HackaCon anonymously.
Full information about the criteria, judge’s panel, submission window,
prize details, leaderboard, and registration can all be found at
https://hackacon.ai.
Those wishing to distribute a digital flyer of the hackathon can
download one here:
https://hackacon.ai/files/2026/05/hackacon_flyer.pdf

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics
                     Forensic Linguistics
                     Phonetics

Subject Language(s): English (eng)




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