Finalist in a pitch competition; 2nd year!

What pitch competition? I’m so excited to share that I got selected as one of the 25 finalists for a pitch competition hosted by my university for the second year in a row! Last year I was in a team doing a fire protection project, but this year I decided to branch out and submit an idea on my own, and I got in! Here’s what I’ve been up to in terms of the project so far and what I did to apply; the idea I applied with is shared at the end <3 The brainstorming The framework I start with every time when developing a new idea is the NABC framework: the need, approach, benefits, and competition. It’s drawn as a square with four sections in each corner, starting with needs. I used Figma to draw it out because the virtual workspace gives me endless room to expand my ideas and add notes without re-writing everything. Once I filled it out with the ideas from my head, I sent a screenshot of it to Claude and prompted it to find the gaps in my idea and ask me questions about them, making me close caveats and sharpen the idea realistically. I would be careful with using AI on this part though, because it can send you down an endless rabbit hole of correcting and re-correcting. After two to three rounds of AI, I looked it over one last time myself and made sure everything made sense to me before going to my slide deck. Making the pitch deck To apply to this particular pitch competition, they required a maximum 10-slide pitch deck. However, since they weren’t getting any other information about my idea other than from the deck, I had to make it wordier in order to convey my thoughts. Always keep in mind that a real pitch deck should have the least number of words possible on the screen and should only be used as an aid to what you’re saying verbally. I couldn’t do that here, so my slides had a few paragraphs of explanations. To get accurate images of my ideal product for my slides, I used Claude and had it give me a figma-style image of a software interface and the hardware component for my idea. It immediately gave me multiple versions to work with and the quality of the exports was excellent. I definitely recommend using AI to generate images of your idea if what you’re thinking of doesn’t exist yet, just be sure to make a descriptive prompt so that it doesn’t get a lot of it wrong. So.. what’s my idea? I’m so glad you asked! I’ve been working on a fluency tool for people who stutter! Being a person who stutters myself, I know how important it is to practice stuttering strategies in the real world, and there isn’t yet a tool that exists which tracks your stuttering (or strategies used) in real-world conversations. That’s why I introduce to you: JewelSpeak! The software-hardware solution to tracking fluency progress outside of therapy or comfort zones (talking with supportive family members or friends). The hardware part is a necklace with a vibration/audio sensing component attached near the throat, designed to be inconspicuous. The device collects vibration data from when the wearer talks as well as down-sampled (to protect privacy) audio to match. There is a machine learning bit that comes into play here; the end goal is to train a model to detect stuttering moments based on vibration and audio combined. This is a novel approach so this must be lab-tested first before developing the product. The software is simply an app that receives data from the hardware and flags vibration/audio bits as potential stutters which the user can approve or dismiss, adding tags such as “strategy used/attempted” to describe the moment. There will also be a journaling component and a progress visualizer, which I feel will increase motivation to keep practicing outside. There’s so much more to this, but I only have so much I can put into words before it becomes an essay, so that’s the gist of it! I’ll be updating my journey as I prepare the finalist poster and the final pitch deck. Stay tuned! -Masha ≽^•⩊•^≼