Build Time!

After raising the $100K from 1517, we hit a roadblock – spring break of April 2024. With our UCL attendance below 20%, we needed to pause for three weeks, cram a year’s worth of content, and sit for our third-year exams.

But, with a mission ahead and a tight timeline, we couldn’t stop for long. Our goal was to validate our technology, convert our proof-of-concept into a wearable prototype, and launch pre-orders by September. The vision? A voice-powered OS that lets you query information and take notes, coupled with ultra-quiet whisper recognition – creating the experience of “AI-in-your-head.”

We had six months, and we were going to need some help.

So we put together a dream team:

Jim Bremner: ex-Head of AI at a facial biometrics scale-up, DJ on the side, and a wizard in ML engineering. Jim worked on our whisper recognition and sensor fusion models.

Daniel Lim Hai: A brilliant course mate from UCL, skilled in 3D design with OpenSCAD and electronics engineering. He worked on the development of our hardware and form factor.

Isaac Tay: Shan’s childhood friend, who’s done ML since he was 14. Isaac flew in to London from Singapore and lived on our air mattress, just because he was excited about the vision. He worked on both our voice-OS and our whisper recognition models.

Berkay Bilik: A maths undergraduate at UCL with a talent for writing clean, beautifully modular code. He was perfect to work on our voice-OS.

We turned Shan’s small London room into our galactic HQ. We covered the walls with whiteboard paper, set up five tables, and huddled together every Friday for an internal Demo Day, to showcase our weekly progress.

In just a month and a half, we:

• Collected over 50 hours of paired data from our vibration sensors and air microphones.
• Achieved a word recognition accuracy of over 90%, pushing the boundaries of low-volume whisper detection. It looks like telepathy, check it out in the comments!
• Developed three iterations of the hardware, each smaller and more integrated.
• Built an agent-based information retrieval and note-taking backend using Burr
• Explored 80+ form studies, working toward a sleeker, smaller form factor.

The pace was exhilarating, and the tech felt magical. But challenges began to crop up, as they always do. Stay tuned for the next post!

Raghav & Sudharshan

Summer 2024 Updates:
Part 1: The origin story
Part 2: Build Time!
Part 3: Burnout