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Insights

Practical writing on AI, technology leadership, and building things that work, drawn from projects I've actually built.

New series · 5 parts

Building a human-sounding voice agent

What I learned building Maya, the open-source voice agent on this site: voices, latency, fine-tuning, sampling, diarization, and memory.

Part 1 · 2 November 2026 · 7 min read

Open-source voices now sound human. Here's what it takes to ship one.

A small open model on a laptop can now clone, design, and fine-tune a voice most people can't tell from a person. The hard part has moved from the voice itself to everything around it.

Start the series

  1. Part 2 · 6 min read

    Where the milliseconds go in a voice agent

    Read

  2. Part 3 · 5 min read

    Fine-tuning a voice: the dataset is the model

    Read

  3. Part 4 · 4 min read

    Temperature, top-k, top-p and repetition penalty, tuned by ear

    Read

  4. Part 5 · 5 min read

    Who's talking, and what do they remember?

    Read

More writing

Topics

  • Voice AI5

    Real-time speech agents, open-source voices, and what makes a conversation feel human.

  • AI adoption1

    Where AI helps, where it doesn't, and how organisations get value from it.

  • Technical leadership1

    Leading teams, making decisions, and building engineering cultures that last.

  • Product development

    Taking ideas from prototype to products people rely on.

  • Automation1

    Practical workflow automation and AI agents that people trust.

  • Emerging technology

    Hardware, IoT, and new tools, viewed through a practical lens.

In progress

  • Product development · Coming soon

    Prototype to production: the unglamorous 80%

  • Emerging technology · Coming soon

    Putting a voice agent on an ESP32

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