Pawford Academy — A SwiftUI Puppy Training App with ElevenLabs AI Voice 🐾🎓
This is a submission for Weekend Challenge: Dog Days Edition What I Built Pawford Academy — Where good dogs become great dogs! 🐾 A native iOS app built with SwiftUI that helps dog owners track their puppy's training journey. The app features an AI-powered voice coach powered by ElevenLabs that cheers your dog on after every training session, a daily mood tracker, and a graduation certificate…
This submission is for the Weekend Challenge: Dog Days Edition. The app, Pawford Academy, is a native iOS app built using SwiftUI. Its purpose is to assist dog owners in tracking their puppy's training journey.
The app offers several key features. A dog profile setup allows users to input their dog's name, breed, and age. There are 16 breeds to choose from, including popular ones like Golden Retriever, Labrador, Husky, and Chow Chow. A daily mood tracker with six options - Happy, Playful, Tired, Grumpy, Anxious, and Calm - helps monitor the dog's emotional state. Training sessions for 10 classic commands such as Sit, Stay, and Roll Over can be logged.
The app also features ElevenLabs AI voice encouragement after every session and mood selection. Upon completing all sessions, a graduation certificate is displayed, featuring the dog's name, breed, and Class of 2026.
The app was built for personal reasons. The creator had a Labrador named Blacky who was their best friend. Building Pawford Academy was a way to honor this memory and create a useful tool for dog lovers.
The tech stack includes SwiftUI for the native iOS UI, ElevenLabs API for the text-to-speech feature, AVFoundation for audio playback, Combine for reactive state management, and URLSession for async networking. The ElevenLabs integration was highlighted as particularly exciting, with the voice announcing remaining training sessions and a graduation announcement when completed.
The app was built from scratch during the challenge weekend. The graduation flow, featuring a paw print progress tracker, was the most satisfying part to develop. A small detail that enhances the AI's presence is the indicator showing "Pawford is speaking..." during voice playback.
This app has won the prize category Best Use of ElevenLabs, as the ElevenLabs AI voice powers the entire voice coaching experience in Pawford Academy.
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