The scarce resource is the listener.
Several agents, one listener. Assistants have had our eyes for years; now they are reaching for our ears. These essays are about what has to sit in between: something that decides who gets the channel, when, and keeps the record. I call that attention accounting.
Essays
- LatestSame Context, Every Surface: The Focus Plane Cross-Surface AI Doesn't HaveThe artifacts we hand between AI surfaces drift, erode, and multiply. The missing component is not memory: it is the estimator that knows what I am on.
- The Attention Plane: What Makes a Voice Assistant an AssistantThe difference between chatting with an LLM and having an assistant is who manages your attention.
- Conversation ≠ intelligenceWWDC 2026 as a natural experiment: model progress does not produce conversation.
- From Push-to-Talk to Natural Conversation: How Voice Pipelines WorkFour pipeline architectures for voice AI, and how to choose the right tier for your use case.
- Voice Conversation ≠ Text Chat + AudioEight assumptions that break when voice is treated as text with an audio layer.
About
I'm a software engineer in San Francisco. I build voice AI agents, at work and on my own time: a voice assistant I've been building since a hackathon, a live translator, and a voice tic-tac-toe game that between them taught me most of what's in these essays. I've been circling the attention question for a while: in 2009, as an analyst, I wrote a report on who would own the phone's idle screen. Earlier still, a PhD in image retrieval.
Publications & earlier writing
- Building a Gen AI ProductNotes from building BookmarksGPT, 2025
- Active Idle Screen 2009–2011: Who Will Own the ScreenApple Books
- Activating the Idle Screen: Uncharted TerritoryInforma Telecoms & Media
- Techniques for Content-Based Image Characterization in Wavelets DomainPhD Thesis, University of South Wales
- Texture-based Image Retrieval in Wavelets Compressed DomainIEEE International Conference on Image Processing
- Faster Distance Calculation in Image Retrieval SystemsIEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics
- Quadtree Based Image Indexing in Wavelets Compressed DomainEurographics UK Conference, IEEE Computer Society Press
Speaking & Teaching
World Bank Global Forum on Innovation & Technology · Future Internet Assembly · Smart Cities Industry Summit · invited expert, Oxford University · guest lecturer, UniCT · startup mentor, LAUNCHub and Startup Weekend.