August was a special month for us. Apart from having our normal meetup station in Costa Rica on August 20th, we took our Meetup Station on the road to Colombia. In combination with our new partners, AI Tinkerers, we visited both Medellín and Bogota as part of the second annual Colombia Tech Week.
Our trip began in Medellin, where we presented on Thursday, August 21st to a packed crowd at Universidad EAFIT. Mariano Alvarez, Google Developer Expert and Senior Full-Stack Engineer at Telescoped, kicked things off with an informative presentation on how AI agents differ from chatbots, which led into a live demo of him building a job‑search agent using Telescoped’s Agent Studio.
AI is evolving fast but most people still don’t understand what an agent really is, how it works, or how to build one that does something useful. In his talk, Mariano broke down the fundamentals of AI agents and showed how to build them using Google’s new Agent Development Kit (ADK).
He showed what makes an agent different from a chatbot, what it can and can’t do, and why agents represent a key shift in how we design AI systems that take action.
Mariano was followed by Jamilton Alonso Quintero Osorio, Tech Lead at Apiux, who showed us how to build a real‑time, voice‑driven multi‑agent system using Google ADK and Gemini Live API, with live function calls that manipulate UI components.
Jamilton presented the architecture and code of a conversational assistant that interviews the user by voice, invokes functions to search, analyze, and compare traffickers (media buyers), and recommended the best profile; all full-duplex with round-trip audio, barge-in (interruptions), and low latency. The demo used the Gemini Live API for bidirectional audio streaming and a persistent session, and function calling to link model intents with UI actions (displaying cards, comparing profiles, initiating contact).
You can see his git, which he shared, here: https://github.com/JamiltonQuintero/jarvis-realtime-agentic/blob/master/index.tsx
The night was rounded out by Sebastián Escobar, CEO at MERO Estudio, who shared how his traditional 2D animation studio evolved into an AI-powered creative studio. He explained the tools, workflows, and creative strategies he and his team use, showcased real-life client case studies, and discussed how AI has expanded their storytelling capabilities without losing the artistic essence and human touch that have always characterized us. You can see his presentation here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AknjBj4fY5xCift8-A-hzTS8yZ_eGOrZ/view?usp=sharing
Exactly a week later, on Thursday, August 28th, in Bogota, we joined forces once again with the AI Tinkerers – this time to crowd nearly double the size!
The theme of the night was how to go from real-world problems to code. The event had vibrant energy, and many minds eager to learn and share… AI builders, tech founders, and AI enthusiasts.
Mariano once again kicked off the evening with an excellent reproduction of his presentation from a week earlier – kicking off a chain reaction Q&A that had to be cut short by the moderators, lest the rest of the presenters run out of time.
Mariano was followed by no less than 7 start-us/projects/hackers/builders recently recognized at a local hackathon hosted by Tribu AI. They ranged from OmniLearn, which generates high-quality, on-demand, ultra-well-formatted learning content, to Ecolegalia, an application that maps geographic areas where infrastructure needs to be built, overlaid onto environmental elements in that area, in order to establish, in accordance with regulations, the appropriate framework for action to obtain the corresponding environmental licenses necessary.
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