Currently 3 active prizes and awards open to applicants in Remote (work-from-anywhere), across AI, arts, film, journalism, research, tech and cross-disciplinary practice. Hand-curated and updated weekly. Almost every entry is funded; a few notable unpaid open calls and festival submissions are included as clearly flagged exceptions. Browse the list below, or use the interactive desk for filtering and shortlisting.
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Intron's Sahara CodeSwitch Africa Challenge awards USD 10,000 in cash prizes for real applications built on African voice AI: apps that understand African-language code-switching, for example when a speaker moves between English and Swahili, English and Igbo, or French and Wolof mid-conversation. TRACKS: Health (clinical documentation, patient intake, maternal health); Legal and Public Services (court transcription, legal aid, citizen services); Fintech, Telco and Customer Experience (voice banking, KYC, payments, support); Agriculture and Education (farmer advisory, tutoring, classroom learning); and Other High-Impact Use Cases (accessibility, media, commerce, culture). REQUIREMENTS: use voice to achieve a downstream task (not just speech-to-text), build with the Intron Sahara API, benchmark Sahara against at least three other speech models, target a specific vertical, and include code-switched audio samples where possible. WHO IS ELIGIBLE: developers, researchers, startups, student teams and NGOs across Africa and the diaspora; solo or teams. DEADLINE: registration and final submissions close 15 September 2026, 11:59pm WAT, so move fast. Winners announced 1 October 2026. TO APPLY: register at intron.io/compete. Free to enter.
Lost in Transcription: Advancing Speech Recognition for Underserved Linguistic Contexts is a machine learning competition on the Mozilla Data Collective platform (run with DrivenData, backed by Mozilla Foundation). Participants build automatic speech recognition (ASR) models for real-world bilingual, code-switched conversations across three independent tracks: Nahuatl x Spanish, Indonesian x Javanese, and North American Spanish x English (Spanglish); developers can also work with other languages if the datasets are available on or uploaded to the MDC platform, which offers ethically sourced multilingual, multicultural and multimodal datasets. PRIZES: USD 20,000 total; per track USD 4,000 for first place and USD 2,000 for second, judged by word error rate on a private leaderboard, plus a bonus award for the lowest average word error rate across all three tracks (same team members required). WHO IS ELIGIBLE: individuals and teams worldwide (students, tech clubs, universities, startup builders, labs, independent tinkerers); 18+ and legal resident of an eligible jurisdiction; one account per person; participants are responsible for complying with school or employer policies. DEADLINE: the platform lists final submissions closing 2 October 2026, midnight UTC (some announcements said 25 September, so check the platform for your track). Free to enter.
A bias bounty from Zindi, Humane Intelligence, Radiant Earth, and the Heising-Simons Foundation: measure coverage gaps in Overture Maps across US Census tracts by comparing it against Census TIGER/Line Roads, Microsoft US Building Footprints, USGS National Map critical facilities, and Census County Business Patterns. Submissions are automatically evaluated with a Bias Score assessing equity metrics across demographic and climate-vulnerability strata, surfacing whose neighbourhoods open map data underserves. PRIZES: 1st USD 4,500, 2nd USD 2,500, 3rd USD 1,500, Best Bias Discovery USD 1,000, Best Documentation USD 500 (USD 10,000 total), plus 10,000 Zindi points. ELIGIBILITY: open to all, teams of up to 4. HOW TO ENTER: create a Zindi account, download the sample submission files, compute coverage-gap scores per tract GEOID, and upload a CSV; 10 submissions per day, 300 total. Free to enter. DEADLINE: 31 October 2026.