Stride

Inspiration

As college students, walking alone at night can feel scary yet for many of us it is inevitable. In those moments, we often wish we had someone on the phone with us, walking us home. That experience inspired us to build Stride, an app that helps people feel safer and less alone when they’re out by themselves.

What it does

Stride lets users start a realistic fake phone call with a character of their choice such as Mom, Dad, or a Friend. Once the call begins, the app displays a phone-like UI and plays an AI-generated one sided conversation, complete with natural pauses so the user can respond. The goal is to make it look and feel like you’re genuinely on a call while walking.

How we built it

We used Gemini to generate dynamic conversation scripts based on the chosen character. We then passed those lines to ElevenLabs, converting them into lifelike audio. On the frontend, we designed a clean, believable call interface and connected everything to the backend so the audio plays in sequence with pauses.

Challenges we ran into

While integrating the Gemini and ElevenLabs APIs was straightforward, getting the frontend and backend to communicate reliably, especially with audio streaming and playback, was much more difficult.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We successfully built an app using multiple AI systems, despite limited experience with LLMs and audio AI. We created a simple, elegant, and realistic UI that enhances the user’s sense of safety. We managed to pull together fully functioning end-to-end audio generation something neither of us had done before.

What we learned

We learned how to integrate and coordinate multiple APIs in a single workflow as well as how to build and connect a backend to a React Native frontend. We also learned how to implement more advanced UI components and gained a deeper understanding of audio processing in mobile apps.

What's next for Stride

We would like to implement two way AI conversations where the app listens and responds to the user in real time. We could also add a safe word feature that triggers an automatic emergency alert as well as a quick access keypad action to send a prewritten message to a trusted contact.

Built With

• elevenlabs
• expo.io
• gemini
• node.js
• react-native