There is a phase of building any genuine undertaking that rarely gets much attention. It arrives after the intoxicating excitement of the beginning has worn off, but long before anything feels finished or presentable. The scaffolding is up, the direction is set, and yet the destination remains abstract. Progress continues, but slowly. Trade-offs become clearer and harden. One begins to wonder whether staying is an act of fidelity, or simply an inability to imagine an exit.
This past year has largely been spent in this space.
From the beginning, voice has played a central role, not as a novelty but as a way of creating something that feels steady, present, and human. Taking that commitment seriously shaped almost everything that followed.
In much of contemporary AI and technology, movement itself has become a kind of proxy for progress. Models are replaced by newer ones. Frameworks give way to better abstractions. Each cycle arrives with its own vocabulary, metrics, and sense of urgency. The pressure to keep up, to always be migrating, upgrading, replatforming, is constant. Often, these shifts are justified. But they also create a culture where motion becomes its own justification.
I chose to resist that pattern. Early decisions intentionally placed privacy ahead of convenience. The system was designed to operate without sending people’s voices, thoughts or inner lives to third parties. This constraint was chosen, not inherited. It has shaped the architecture, the tooling and the pace of progress. It led to higher costs, heavier infrastructure, and slower iteration. Each small change required more effort and time than it would have if the goal had been simply to move fast or stay current.
For a long time, the work lived in this state: functional, careful, and demanding. The temptation to compromise, to accept defaults, to rely on opaque systems, to trade clarity for speed, was always present. In a landscape where momentum is rewarded and hesitation is suspect, staying with a set of decisions can feel indistinguishable from falling behind. Resisting that temptation did not feel heroic. It felt necessary.
What became clear over time was that patience on its own is not what sustains work like this. Patience without something solid underneath it erodes quickly. Friction starts to feel personal. Delays begin to resemble failure. What made it possible to continue was having a clear sense for what the project was for, and what it was not willing to become. A small set of commitments stayed fixed even as tools, techniques, and assumptions shifted around them: privacy, care, and an insistence on keeping people’s inner lives private by design.
Toward the end of the year, something shifted. After a long period of working within tight constraints, a change finally simplified the system in a meaningful way. We moved text-to-speech generation onto the CPU. This reduced costs, made scaling more practical, and did so without sacrificing quality. Just as importantly, it brought the system closer to the values it was built around: local processing, predictability and care.
The change itself was not dramatic, but its effects were immediate. For the first time in a while, it felt like the project and I were no longer pulling against each other.
This year did not produce clarity through speed or decisive breakthroughs. Instead, it offered something quieter. Staying with the work reshaped how I think about building in general. Novelty mattered less than reliability. Cleverness mattered less than simplicity. And progress, I learned, does not need to announce itself loudly in order to be real.
Many projects do not fail because they are impossible. They end because the middle lasts longer than expected, and the reasons for continuing become harder to see. In fast-moving fields like AI, the middle is especially uncomfortable. It lacks the excitement of discovery and the validation of completion, while offering no obvious narrative to justify itself.
If you are in the middle of something yourself, something slow, uncertain or unglamourous, I don’t have advice about pushing harder or moving faster. Only this: patience seems to hold best when it is anchored to something wroth holding onto.
Michael Stewart 