Dify Hackathon

Yongkang Zou · 2025-07-15 · hackathon · LLM Infrastructure

I didn't expect a hometown connection at VivaTech. Dify is an open-source AI platform I've been using heavily. I found out their core team is based in Suzhou, a city right next to my hometown of Nanjing. That discovery made the event feel a bit more personal.

The highlight of the week happened during an afternoon of intense vibe coding at a campus event organized by Dify and Datawhale. I built an AI voice translator agent using Dify, ElevenLabs, and Twilio. We ended up taking first place.

Testing the voice translation flow

The agent acts as a bridge between two people speaking different languages. One person speaks on the phone, the system translates the text, synthesizes the audio, and the other person hears the response in their native language.

The orchestration pipeline inside Dify

The logic happens entirely inside Dify. The pipeline takes the phone input, passes it to an LLM for initial processing, makes an HTTP request to handle external APIs, routes through a second LLM for formatting, and returns the translated reply.

Retrieval Strategies

The workshop also covered advanced retrieval strategies for LLMs. We spent time on parent-child chunking. Instead of passing the exact small chunk that matches a query to the LLM, you retrieve a larger parent document that provides the surrounding context. This prevents the model from losing the thread on fragmented information. It is highly relevant for the RAG pipelines I am building right now.

VivaTech was a solid reminder that the open-source community is incredibly connected. Building tools that break down language barriers requires openness and collaboration. I am looking forward to seeing what the Suzhou team ships next.

Photos