How do you create a live, interactive experience in one weekend that wins the popular vote amongst engineers?

How do you create a live, interactive experience in one weekend that wins the popular vote amongst engineers?

Introducing Elbo, Grand Prize Winner at Silly Hacks.

Introducing Elbo, Grand Prize Winner at Silly Hacks.

Introducing Elbo, Grand Prize Winner at Silly Hacks.

Contributions: Product scope, puppet design and personality (prompt), UI, illustrations and animations.
Project link

  1. Context

There were only two rules for Silly Hacks:
- Be as silly as possible
- Ship to production

The goal of this hackathon was to design and ship a product silly enough to be considered a prank, but polished enough to be shipped live to production.

  1. Inspirations and Project Scope

Due to the overwhelming success of Pogi Chat, I decided I wanted to make another character-centered project.

My team and I decided we wanted to make a hardware project, and I was in charge of scoping both my and my team's abilities. After assessing the parts in my teammate's old Arduino kit, I realized we could create a single movement puppet to lip sync with audio output.

I decided we should make a parody version of Elmo from Sesame Street - except instead of a cute monster selling ABCs, its a parodied version selling you Software as a Service (SaaS). Plus, I had the pun "SaaSame Street" rolling around in my head for a bit and thought it would qualify as "silly" for the hackathon theme.

  1. Testing, iterations, and visuals

The original idea was to have a cute, simple character similar to Elmo that spoke in a high-pitched voice and overall would look friendly and approachable. This idea was changed when my team realized the ElevenLab's voice library didn't have anything that was just quite right.

Racing against time, we tested each voice and found the most best-sounding was a scraggly, deep male voice.

I realized this voice would not match the original Elbo persona I designed (upper left image), so I did a quick iteration with the puppet felt and came up with a new, grouchy persona to fit him. (bottom right image).

  1. Final Product

In order to let as many people enjoy Elbo as possible, especially those that weren't physically with us in the room, the final product resulted of two major parts:

1. Elbo: A robotic puppet would talk while syncing it's mouth to his words.
2. SaaSame Street: A landing page and a stream page that showed a livestream video of Elbo via Twitch. Users could then enter any website they wanted and "Elbo" would look at the website, evaluate it, and then start selling to viewers live on stream.

  1. Enter a Website you want Elbo to visit and shill

  1. Wait ~10 seconds and witness Elbo work his mouth-synced sales magic!

  1. Results and Reception

  1. Results and Reception

  1. Results and Reception

  1. Results and Reception

We launched Elbo live and self-automated on Twitch for over 2 hours, offering to become a salesman to any user who entered their website URL onto the Saasame Street website.

He had an an overwhelming response from users on the internet! Unfortunately his career came to an end after 1 million tokens were used up by the Claude API, and Anthropic rate limited us.

Despite this, he was still considered a big success both to the team as well to the Silly Hacks, which gave us one of three Grand Prizes.

Elbo went live and self-automated on Twitch for over 2 hours, offering to become a salesman to any user who entered their website URL to his website.

Unfortunately, his career ended due to an overwhelming response and rate-limited tokens from Anthropic for the AI-powered portion.