Ritual Radio — Turn Your World Cup Rituals into Legendary AI Commentary

A developer built Ritual Radio, a World Cup fan-ritual announcer that uses ElevenLabs and Google Gemini to generate dramatic AI commentary based on user rituals. The app simulates match events and narrates them with a passionate sports-announcer voice, turning superstitions into a live broadcast experience.

This is a submission for Weekend Challenge: Passion Edition https://dev.to/challenges/weekend-2026-07-09 https://dev.to/challenges/weekend-2026-07-09 What I Built Ritual Radio is a World Cup fan-ritual announcer. It takes the superstitions fans actually do before a match — wearing lucky socks, spinning three times, only sitting in one chair — and narrates simulated match moments as if those rituals were a real force on the pitch. You pick your team, describe your ritual, choose a commentator voice, and hit Start Broadcast. The app generates live match events red cards, miracle saves, last-minute free kicks and calls each one with dramatic, AI-generated commentary that weaves your ritual into the action. It was built for the Passion Edition theme: football devotion is irrational, emotional, and deeply personal. Ritual Radio turns that passion into a broadcast you can listen to. Demo Code A World Cup fan-ritual announcer powered by ElevenLabs + Google Gemini. Built for the DEV Weekend Challenge: Passion Edition https://dev.to/challenges/passion . Every football fan has a ritual. Ritual Radio turns yours into live, dramatic match commentary. The voice is generated with ElevenLabs and the commentary script is written by Google Gemini . cd ritual-radio … </p Live repo: https://github.com/yueliao11/ritual-radio https://github.com/yueliao11/ritual-radio How I Built It • Flask serves a single-page app and two JSON APIs: • /api/next-event returns a simulated match moment. • /api/commentary writes the script and converts it to speech. • Google Gemini generates the commentary when a key is provided, prompted to act like a superstitious World Cup radio announcer. • ElevenLabs is the heart of the demo. It turns the script into audio using a passionate sports-announcer voice. I use the eleven flash v2 5 model, cache generated MP3s by content hash, and serve them back so the broadcast feels instant. • The frontend is vanilla HTML/CSS/JS with a retro radio UI, an audio visualizer, and an optional API-key section so anyone can try it with their own keys. • I recorded the demo video with Playwright, automating the browser so the submission would have a clean, reproducible visual. ElevenLabs is not a decorative add-on here — it is the experience. Without the voice, Ritual Radio is just text on a screen. With it, the broadcast feels real. Prize Categories Best Use of ElevenLabs