Winning JunctionX Lisbon 2025 earned Duarte Pereira da Cruz, Daniel Borges and André Pagaime, Computer Science and Engineering undergraduates at Técnico, a place at Junction 2025. The hackathon took place in Espoo, Finland, from 14 to 16 November 2025, under the theme Utopia & Dystopia.
What they built in Finland
The team developed BetterMeeting, an AI meeting assistant for Snap’s Spectacles augmented-reality glasses. As described by Técnico, it combined:
- real-time subtitles, using ElevenLabs speech-to-text;
- full transcripts and meeting summaries, using Google Gemini;
- automatic extraction of tasks into the user’s calendar;
- a “podcast mode” that reads transcripts and summaries aloud with ElevenLabs text-to-speech.
The project was aimed at companies with frequent or multilingual meetings and at people with hearing difficulties, and it was entered in challenges run by Snapchat, Google and ElevenLabs. Along the way the team had to deal with capturing audio in noisy rooms, keeping latency low and protecting data privacy. The sources do not report a final placing.
Duarte Pereira da Cruz told Técnico that the team had 48 hours to build, test and present a working solution against very experienced teams, and that representing Técnico and Portugal on a global stage accelerated their learning, creativity and teamwork.
On the radio
On 18 November 2025, Antena 1’s programme Duas de Prosa (RTP) dedicated an episode, in Portuguese, to the students’ trip to Finland and to their project to help control invasive acacias.
Where it started
The team qualified by winning JunctionX Lisbon 2025, the founding edition, where, according to Técnico, it placed first in both the General and Peer Review categories with an AI system that detects invasive acacia species in drone and satellite imagery. Two of the three, Daniel Borges and Duarte Pereira da Cruz, went on to lead the organisation of JunctionX Lisbon 2026.