01 / WHO
I make AI feel like a real product.
Most AI demos crumble under a real conversation. I obsess over the seams: latency, interruption handling, tool-use, fallback. The work that survives contact with users is the work I want to do.
VOICE-DRIVEN PORTFOLIO · 2026
Ask me
anything.
I'm Bill Zhang, Applied AI Engineer at Scale, voice-first builder, serial hackathon winner. This site listens. Talk to it, scroll it, drag it around. It'll rearrange.
ABOUT
A builder who listens first.
02 / WHAT
Voice-first, agent-shaped systems.
Phones. Smart glasses. Browser sidebars. Pinned terminals. Wherever the interface is least visual, I'm trying to make it more useful: for banking, education, public safety, food rescue, sports tape.
03 / HOW
Ship a startup-grade product every weekend.
Thirty-six hackathon wins is a lot of weekends. The discipline of 36 hours sharpens the instinct: pick the smallest demo that proves the hypothesis, build the spine first, decorate last.
04 / WHY
The next billion users will talk to software.
Most people on Earth still type slower than they speak, and a lot of them never learned to type at all. Every product I touch tries to bend the floor of access a little closer to the ground.
PROJECTS · 6 STANDOUTS
Things I shipped.
Curated gallery
Ask by voice for any project, or filter the archive.
★ Grand Prize, UC Berkeley AI Hackathon 2024/dispatchai↗ deep diveDispatch AI
Empathetic 911 dispatcher co-pilot. Aggregates emergency calls, triages severity, extracts context, and keeps humans in control.
#ai#voice#safety#winner2024
★ Google Challenge, LA Hacks 2024/adapted↗ deep diveAdaptEd
Lectures that talk back. A voice tutor with Gemini-driven slides and emotion-aware pacing.
#ai#voice#education#winner2024
★ Grand + Goldman Sachs, HackUTD 2024/talktuahbank↗ deep diveTalkTuahBank
Voice banking over a regular phone call. No internet, smartphone, or banking app required.
#voice#fintech#ai#winner2024
★ MLH GitHub, CruzHacks 2023/slugloop↗ deep diveSlugLoop
Real-time UCSC loop bus tracker. Helped students see live campus bus locations and reduce pressure on metro routes.
#transit#social-good#winner2023
★ NLX Overall, AI ATL 2024/soundsearch↗ deep diveSoundSearch
Phone-call voice guidance for complex websites. A caller gets step-by-step spoken help while the page highlights what to do next.
#voice#ai#accessibility#winner2024
★ 2nd Place, Hack Dearborn 2024/swarmaid↗ deep diveSwarmAid
Decentralized food rescue agents. Matches surplus suppliers to food banks and shelters with real-time logistics planning.
#ai#social-good#winner2024
SCROLL ↓ drives gallery →
6/15 standouts
HACKATHONS · 36 WINS
Thirty-six wins from shipping.
Hackathon culture is a forge. You start with nothing, you ship something, you defend it on a stage. These are selected public wins from a broader run with $150k+ in prizes.
SpartaHack X★ Sustainability✦HackMerced X★ Letta + Finance✦Hack Dearborn★ 2nd Place✦HackUTD 2024★ Grand Prize + Goldman Sachs✦UC Berkeley AI 2024★ Grand Prize $25k✦CruzHacks 2023★ MLH GitHub✦LA Hacks★ Google Challenge✦AI ATL 24★ NLX Overall✦SoCal Tech Week★ SolanaU✦SpartaHack X★ Sustainability✦HackMerced X★ Letta + Finance✦Hack Dearborn★ 2nd Place✦HackUTD 2024★ Grand Prize + Goldman Sachs✦UC Berkeley AI 2024★ Grand Prize $25k✦CruzHacks 2023★ MLH GitHub✦LA Hacks★ Google Challenge✦AI ATL 24★ NLX Overall✦SoCal Tech Week★ SolanaU✦
2024 / SolanaU✦2024 / NLX Overall✦2024 / Google Challenge✦2023 / MLH GitHub✦2024 / Grand Prize $25k✦2024 / Grand Prize + Goldman Sachs✦2024 / 2nd Place✦2024 / Letta + Finance✦2025 / Sustainability✦2024 / SolanaU✦2024 / NLX Overall✦2024 / Google Challenge✦2023 / MLH GitHub✦2024 / Grand Prize $25k✦2024 / Grand Prize + Goldman Sachs✦2024 / 2nd Place✦2024 / Letta + Finance✦2025 / Sustainability✦
36
Hackathons won
$74k
Largest prize
$150k+
Prizes won
9
Voice-AI shipped
EXPERIENCE
A short, productive career.
Jun 2025 — Now
Applied AI Engineer
Scale AI · San Francisco
Enterprise Generative AI Platform team. Building agentic automation, LLM evaluation workflows, and multi-agent systems for enterprise AI.
NowSep 2023 — Jun 2025
AI Engineer
RingCentral · Remote
Shipped LLM evaluations and multi-agent assistants for customer-support workflows after starting as a senior AI intern building LLM-powered assistant prototypes.
Jun 2024 — Dec 2024
Co-founder + CFO
Dispatch AI · Remote
Built an emergency-response AI platform with Berkeley SkyDeck funding. Solo-engineered the voice AI and telephony integration behind the dispatcher demo.
May 2024 — Dec 2024
Co-founder
WeCracked · Remote
Co-founded a 4K-member hackathon community with sponsor backing, helping student builders find teams, ship faster, and learn from winning projects.
Feb 2023 — Jun 2024
Founder
SlugLoop · Santa Cruz
Founded and shipped the UCSC real-time bus tracker, turning live campus transit data into a student-facing map for loop buses.
Jun 2023 — Dec 2023
Teacher
X-Camp Academy · Remote
Taught Python with a challenge-based curriculum, helping new programmers build fundamentals through hands-on coding problems.
Jan 2023 — Jun 2023
Software Engineer Intern
SproutLabs, LLC · Remote
Engineered a real-time device dashboard and cross-platform backend for connected hardware workflows.
Jun 2022 — Jun 2023
Teaching Assistant
X-Camp Academy · San Jose
Coached USACO students from Bronze toward Silver mastery through algorithm practice, debugging, and contest prep.
2023 — 2025+
Hackathon Mainstay
36 wins across the hackathon circuit
Mainly competed during college and still jumps into select events. Most of the projects on this page started as weekend builds.
EDUCATION
Three schools, one path.
Click a card to flip it.
01 / 03
University of Southern California
M.S. Computer Science, AI Specialization
Aug 2023 — May 2025
FLIP ↻
USC · NOTES
M.S. Computer Science, AI Specialization
Graduate-level ML, applied AI, agentic systems. Built voice-first products throughout.
BACK ↺
02 / 03
UC Santa Cruz
B.S. Computer Science
Sep 2020 — Mar 2023
FLIP ↻
UCSC · NOTES
B.S. Computer Science
Finished a 4-year program in 2.5 years. Caught the hackathon bug.
BACK ↺
03 / 03
Lynbrook High School
College Prep
2016 — 2020
FLIP ↻
Lynbrook · NOTES
College Prep
South Bay. First wrote code here.
BACK ↺
I buildvoice-firstagentsthat ship inweekends,wingrand prizes,and run inproduction.I care aboutlatency,human-in-the-loopcontrol, and thequiet craftof making AI feel like arealproduct.
RESUME · ONE-PAGER
The printable version.
Same story, traditional format. Click through below or grab the PDF; both stay in lock-step with everything else on this page.
resume.pdf · last updated May 10, 2026
5+
Years building
36
Hackathon wins
9
Voice apps shipped
$150k+
Prizes won
At a glance
- AI engineer: voice-first agents, multimodal pipelines, real-time inference.
- Scale AI Applied AI Engineer: enterprise GenAI, LLM evals, multi-agent systems.
- USC: M.S. Computer Science, AI specialization.
- Stack: TypeScript / Python / Rust, Next.js, Retell, Twilio, Mistral, Llama.
Voice tip
“Send me your resume.” → opens the download.
HOW THIS SITE WORKS
A portfolio that talks back.
Most portfolios are read-only documents. This one is an agent. You speak, and the structured tool calls coming back from the LLM rearrange the page in real time: filter projects, scroll, expand a deep-dive, jump to a specific section. The voice agent is the navigation.
01
Mic input
Browser mic stream → Retell client SDK. Low-latency WebRTC pipe to a hosted agent.
02
LLM agent
Retell agent runs an instruction-tuned model with this site's content + a small tool registry as its world.
03
Tool calls
Agent emits structured tool calls: filter_projects(tag), focus_project(id), open_project(id), scroll_to(section).
04
VoiceBus
A pub-sub on window broadcasts each tool call. No prop drilling, no router. Sections opt in.
05
Sections react
Each section subscribes to the events it cares about and animates its own state. The site rearranges itself.
06
Voice reply
The agent confirms in spoken English while the page settles. The user keeps both hands free.
Voice
- Retell AI (agent runtime)
- WebRTC (stream)
- Custom tool registry
Brain
- GPT-4 / Claude (selectable)
- Site-grounded system prompt
- Function-calling JSON schema
Frame
- Next.js + React 19
- Three.js + GLSL bg
- Framer Motion + GSAP
State
- VoiceBus pub-sub
- URL-driven section anchors
- Per-section local React state
// every section subscribes to the same bus
VoiceBus.on((cmd) => {
if (cmd.type === "filter") setFilter(cmd.tag);
if (cmd.type === "focus") setFocusId(cmd.id);
if (cmd.type === "open") setOpenId(cmd.id);
if (cmd.type === "scroll") scrollToSection(cmd.id);
});
// the agent's tool calls become events
agent.onToolCall("filter_projects", ({ tag }) =>
VoiceBus.emit({ type: "filter", tag })
);off the clock · off the clock · off the clock
music · climbing · coffee
made in san francisco
OFF THE CLOCK
A few true things.
SHOT · 2025 · LA
✦Finished a 4-year CS degree in 2.5 years.
✦Won my first hackathon at 17. Haven't slowed down.
✦Speaks Mandarin and English; building agents in both.
✦If I'm not coding, I'm probably climbing or chasing good coffee.
✦Plays drums and piano on the side.
✦Believe the next billion users will talk to software, not click it.
› Try asking the orb: “What does Bill do for fun?”