PointBlank
This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend What I Built I built PointBlank, an unforgiving, brutally honest AI speech coach designed in a strict Neo-Brutalist aesthetic. I built this for a close friend who is an incredibly talented developer but struggles with "rambling" during high-stakes technical interviews and executive design reviews. Whenever they get…
PointBlank is a brutally honest AI speech coach app created by Jayant Kumar for a close friend who is an excellent developer but struggles with rambling during high-stakes technical interviews and executive design reviews. The app enforces the PREP Framework (Point, Reason, Example, Point) and gives users 20 seconds to organize their thoughts and a hard 90 seconds to speak.
PointBlank records the speech and uses an AI model to harshly evaluate the cadence and structure. If the user rambles, the AI gives a failing grade, points out filler words, and offers a polished rewrite of what should have been said. The app uses React (Vite) and Tailwind CSS v4 to create a high-contrast, zero-border-radius Neo-Brutalist UI that matches the harsh nature of the coach.
The AI pipeline uses Web Speech API for real-time acoustic intake, Google GenAI SDK for analysis, and strict system instructions to act as a brutally honest English communication coach. Open innovation and open-weight models, such as Gemma-4-26b-a4b-it, are crucial for projects like PointBlank, allowing developers to create specific, highly-tuned agent personas without being restricted by corporate safety filters.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
