Hack The Talk

What should the submitted code do?
Your submission must be able to detect emotions of conversations. You are free to use any open source speech processing libraries. Your code would need to classify a audio file as “happy”, “unhappy”, “neutral” or “angry”.

What type of conversations are these?
These are telephonic conversations involving two people in most cases.

What languages are these conversations in?
These conversations are in English, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu or Hindi

Would a conversation have multiple languages?
Yes. Some of the conversations might be in multiple languages (from the ones mentioned above)

Would there be training data provided that can be used to tune our implementation?
Yes. You will be provided a set of audio files classified as “happy”, “angry”, “neutral” and “unhappy”. All these audio files are conversations stored in mp3 format. These audio files are 8 kHz, Mono and are all recorded over the telephone

Are these real conversations?
They are a mix of simulated and real life conversations used with permissions. The simulated conversations have been created to match real life scenarios. These conversations must be used only for the purpose of the hackathon.

What if a conversation has a neutral tone to most part, but has a angry tone only for a smaller part? How do these conversations need to be classified?
Most human conversations mix multiple emotions, but have a dominant emotion. Take the case of customer call which would initially start out as a neutral conversation and move towards a angry, happy or unhappy tone. For the case you mention, the conversation must be classified as angry. Your code needs to classify the conversation with the dominant emotion

Can I convert voice samples to text and detect emotion based on words used?
You are free to use whatever algorithm/methodology you think would work. But do keep in mind that the conversations are in different languages Indian languages

How would the submissions be evaluated?
Your code will be run against thousands of conversations and evaluated for the accuracy with which it detects emotions. The submissions which are most accurate makes the cut

Do I need to pay any money to register for the Hackathon?
No. You do not have to pay anything to anyone to register yourself for any Hackathon on HackerEarth.

Do I need to have any specific qualifications to be a participant for the Hackathon?
If you love to code, you are more than welcome to participate in the Hackathon.

How do I submit what I have made for the Hackathon?
You have to develop the application on your local system and submit it on HackerEarth in tar/zip file format along with instructions to run the application and source code.

Do we need to have the entire idea fully working?
The entire idea need not be fully implemented however, the submission should be functional so that it can be reviewed by the judges.

How is the environment? Will your environment support any language? Will you provide any IDE and DB for us to work on ideas?
You have to develop the entire software application on your local system and submit it on HackerEarth in tar/zip file format along with instructions to run the application and source code.

Does one have to be online and available for the entire duration of the Hackathon?
No, one does not need to be logged in on HackerEarth or be online for the entire duration. You can develop the application on your local system based on the four given themes and then submit it on HackerEarth, on the specific challenge page.

Since there is no specific technology mentioned, are there any restrictions on using number of pre-built libraries?
There is no restriction to use any language, technology stack, or libraries. You can use any of them to create the web/mobile application.

Do I need to give a demo for the product that I have built?
If you want you can submit a small presentation or video that demos your submission, however it's not mandatory, and only good to have. In case you are one of the winners, you might be invited to demo your application at an offline event, details of which will be shared with sufficient advance notice.

A fully developed application need to have a solid backend for data storage like SQL, SharePoint etc. since its online, is it accepted to show only the proto type of it?
Yes it's absolutely fine to submit just the prototype. If you use any database like MySQL or PostgresSQL you can also submit a database dump along with your submission. However you are allowed to submit just the prototype.

If it is a team submission, does that mean all team members will have access to work at the same time?
Yes, all team members can login from their account and do application submission on HackerEarth.

Who will own the IP(Intellectual Property) Rights to the product that I have built?
The IP of the product/code of the winners will belong to Exotel, if they choose to accept the prize. Other developers will retain complete IP over their code/product and they may wish to put it in open source domain under any license they want to.