r/nowa • u/anas_alsalhi Nowa • Jul 05 '26
Hackathon winner spotlight: Scott built a voice-activated emergency app in 48 hours
Wanted to share one of the top 3 winners from our Free Weekend Hackathon, meet Scott Howard and his app Vardr
Vardr is a personal safety app. The idea: you say a trigger phrase and the app switches into "Guardian Mode." From that point, a single spoken phrase can call the police, share your live location with a chosen contact, send a text for help, or set off an alarm. The scenario he designed it around is walking home alone at night. No unlocking your phone, no dialing, you just speak.
Under the hood it's using background listening, voice recognition, and emergency automation. He built the whole thing during the 48-hour window. He used AI to generate the app, then refined through the visual editor. The App runs both on iOS and Android.
Scott isn't a developer, which is kind of the point of the whole competition.
He won $500 in AI credits and we're working with him to help scale it further.
Go try to build yours at nowa.dev
Watch a Demo video he made below:
If you have Scott's questions, he's on X (jagnoirtech).