The portal is closed. The entries are in. The judges have been equipped with headphones and score sheets. In other words: judging has officially begun.

For the next fortnight or so, the HackaCon panel will be working through the submissions against the four published criteria:

• Voice similarity: how convincingly the voices match Agent Luke and Chris Nemesis
• Naturalness: whether the speech and conversation actually sound like human beings talking to one another
• Content: whether the required elements of the scenario made it into the conversation
• Creative flair: all the clever, careful, unexpected things people have done to make their submission work

To take on this challenge, we have assembled an unnecessarily formidable collection of forensic speech scientists, conversation analysts, criminologists and forensic linguists.

Alongside the overall rankings, we’ll also be looking for the Special Category Prizes, designed to reward the best school submission, and submissions that achieve something particularly interesting, ingenious, ambitious or otherwise memorable.

So if you entered: thank you. Properly. We know how much work some of these submissions represent, and now we finally get to hear what you made.

Results and rankings will appear on the Scoreboard later this month.

Until then, please imagine five academics listening very intently to fake conversations between two people who do not exist.

Everything is normal.