Challenge

Build Echo - The AI Workspace That Thinks With You

Persist Ventures logo

Hosted by Persist Ventures

Cash prize

$250/-

Equity

10%

Free credits

AWS

Free credits

Google Cloud

API credits

Claude

Plan included

Claude Code

API credits

OpenAI

Plan included

Codex

Pro plan

Cursor

Credits

Vercel

Domain credits

Hosting

1:1 feedback

Founder

Shoutout

LinkedIn

About this challenge

Build a working prototype of an AI powered collaborative workspace where teams can meet, talk, and think together on a shared visual canvas. As the conversation happens, AI understands the discussion and turns ideas, decisions, questions, and relationships into visuals in real time, bringing the meeting and the canvas together in one seamless experience.

This video explains what problems currently exist in an existing app, solve them and you win.

What to build

  • Build a collaborative meeting workspace where teams can have audio/video conversations directly inside the canvas.
  • Think Google Meet + Miro + AI - the meeting and the visual workspace are connected instead of being separate tools.
  • While people talk, the AI should understand the conversation and automatically build the canvas with ideas, topics, decisions, questions, tasks, diagrams, and other useful visuals.
  • Participants should be able to talk, see each other, and interact with the canvas simultaneously.
  • The canvas should update in real time as the discussion evolves, keeping the entire conversation and visual context connected.
  • Users should be able to tell the AI what to change naturally, such as “group these ideas,” “move this under the problem,” or “visualize this.”
  • Support collaboration features such as shared cursors, seeing where other participants are working, and Follow Me mode so everyone can follow the presenter.
  • The workspace should be persistent, so the team can leave a room and return later with the conversation context and canvas still intact.
  • The goal is to make the meeting itself produce a living visual representation of the team's thinking, without someone having to manually build the board.

Who should enter

  • Open to developers, AI engineers, full-stack builders, product designers, indie hackers, and small teams.
  • Ideal for builders interested in AI, real-time collaboration, video/audio communication, canvas interfaces, and agentic products.
  • Any tech stack or AI model is allowed, choose whatever you think is best.
  • You don't need to build the entire vision. Focus on proving the core experience: people talk → AI understands → the shared canvas builds itself.

How it works

  1. 1

    Enter the challenge

    Register to unlock the brief and get started.

  2. 2

    Build your solution

    Ship a working solution against the challenge brief.

  3. 3

    Get reviewed & rewarded

    Top submissions are evaluated against the scoring rubric.

Challenge task

Build an AI Collaborative Visual Workspace

Advanced~40h

Build a working prototype of an AI powered collaborative workspace where teams can meet, communicate, and think together on a shared visual canvas. The experience should bring video communication, real time collaboration, and AI powered visualization into one seamless workspace.

What to build

The idea is simple: the conversation becomes the canvas. As people talk, the AI understands what they are discussing and transforms their ideas, decisions, questions, tasks, and relationships into meaningful visual elements directly on the shared workspace.

Expectations

The prototype should demonstrate a seamless experience where people talk, AI understands, and the canvas builds itself. Participants should be able to collaborate in real time, see and interact with the same workspace, and guide the AI using natural language. Focus on making the experience feel intelligent, natural, and genuinely useful rather than building just another video meeting or whiteboard tool.

Skills

Next.jsPythonFastAPIReactNode.jsExpress.jsTypeScriptResponsive DesignUX DesignUI DevelopmentREST APIsPostgreSQLor Any Tech Stack

Resources

Enter the challenge to unlock resources

Deadline
20 days after applying
Attempts allowed
10

How we evaluate

  • Product Experience: How intuitive, polished, and seamless the overall meeting and canvas experience feels.
  • AI Intelligence: How well the AI understands the conversation and turns it into meaningful visuals and structure.
  • Real Time Collaboration: How smoothly multiple people can communicate, interact, and work together on the shared canvas.
  • Visual Quality: How effectively the product transforms ideas and discussions into clear, useful, and engaging visuals.
  • Adaptability: How well users can guide the AI and reshape the canvas using natural language.
  • Technical Execution: Code quality, architecture, performance, reliability, and overall execution.
  • Innovation: How creatively the submission pushes the idea beyond a traditional video meeting or whiteboard.

$250/- · 10% equity

Persist Ventures

Sign in to enter