Submission by Sandman

🎙️ NewsTalk AI — Voice-Powered News Intelligence What we built: NewsTalk AI is a fully voice-controlled, AI-powered news platform that reads the latest headlines aloud and lets you have natural conversations about any story — completely hands-free. Think of it as your personal AI news anchor that you can talk to. Just say "next news," "switch to sports," "change language to Hindi," or ask "what does this mean?" — and the AI responds instantly. It supports 10+ languages, 8 news categories, and 12 countries. The problem it solves: Reading news takes time and attention. You can't scroll through articles while cooking, driving, commuting, or working out. Existing news apps are screen-dependent — they demand your eyes and hands. NewsTalk AI eliminates that entirely. You press one button, and the AI starts reading the news. You interrupt it with your voice anytime — skip stories, switch topics, ask follow-up questions, or change languages — all without touching the screen. It turns passive news consumption into an interactive, voice-first experience that works even when your hands and eyes are busy. How we built it with Cursor IDE: The entire project was built from scratch using Cursor IDE as our primary development environment. Cursor's AI-powered coding assistant helped us rapidly prototype and iterate on the architecture — from designing the modular service layer (news fetching, voice recognition, TTS, AI chat) to debugging complex async audio lifecycle issues like overlapping speech streams and echo cancellation. Features that would normally take days — like continuous voice recognition with keep-alive, multi-language support, and real-time news aggregation from RSS feeds — were shipped in hours thanks to Cursor's intelligent code generation and context-aware suggestions. Every line of code, every bug fix, every deployment was done inside Cursor. How we used ElevenLabs: ElevenLabs API powers the entire voice experience. We use their eleven_multilingual_v2 model to generate natural, human-like speech in 10+ languages — English, Hindi, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Arabic, Chinese, and Korean. When the AI reads a news article or responds to a question, the text is sent to ElevenLabs' text-to-speech API, which returns high-quality audio that plays seamlessly in the browser. We built a custom audio lifecycle manager on top of it — with abort controllers to cancel in-flight API requests when the user interrupts, generation counters to prevent stale audio from playing, and automatic cleanup to ensure only one voice stream is ever active. The result is a buttery-smooth, interruptible voice experience that feels like talking to a real person.