100 points · 1 submission
with Replit
Ghostwriter AI – A text-to-speech app that almost worked (but I shipped anyway) So here's the story. I joined ElevenHacks because I wanted to build something cool with ElevenLabs' voice API. My idea was simple: an app called Ghostwriter AI. You type or paste any text – notes, a script, a random paragraph – pick a voice, and the AI reads it out loud like a ghostwriter who speaks instead of writes. I thought it would be useful for students who learn better by listening, or anyone who just wants to hear their text in a realistic voice. I spent hours building the frontend. Got the UI looking clean. Added a dropdown menu with different voice options. Made a text input area that actually looks decent. Built an audio player that was ready to play the generated speech. Everything was working perfectly on the design side. Then I tried to integrate the ElevenLabs API. And that's when things fell apart. The Replit Core discount code – the one that was supposed to give free API credits for hackathon participants – kept showing "invalid or expired". I tried it so many times. Typed it carefully. Copied and pasted it. Restarted my repl. Restarted my browser. Even restarted my laptop like that would magically fix it. Nothing worked. The code was dead. No discount code = no API credits = no valid API key. My live app couldn't make any API calls. All that work and the core feature was broken. I felt like giving up. But then I thought: hackathons aren't just about perfect working demos. They're about showing what you can do, even when things go wrong. So I recorded a full demo video. In the video, I walk through the entire app – the UI, the voice selection, the text input, and I explain exactly how the ElevenLabs API would generate speech if I had a working key. The video proves the concept is real, even if the live site can't call the API right now. You can watch the demo here: https://youtu.be/UVw-TDGchUw The code is all on GitHub. It's messy, it's student code, but it's mine. You can see the API integration logic, the frontend, everything. I also tried to deploy it on Vercel, but without a valid API key, the live demo just shows errors. So the YouTube video is my real submission. What did I learn? That shipping something – even a demo video and a half-working app – is better than shipping nothing. That expired discount codes and broken API keys are just part of the student dev experience. And that if you can build under pressure with free tier limitations, you can build anything. Thanks to ElevenLabs for the challenge and Replit for the dev environment (even if that discount code hurt my feelings). Next hackathon, I'm bringing my own API key. Links: Demo video: https://youtu.be/UVw-TDGchUw GitHub repo: https://github.com/Niraj123kumar/ElevenHack_3_Replit #ElevenHacks #GhostwriterAI #StudentDev
Submitted 9 Apr 2026