I build offline speech and language AI (ASR, TTS, voice cloning, translation) for a low-resource language, solo, on consumer hardware. These are the field notes: what broke, what measured well, and what transfers.

• Round-trip CER: shipping TTS in a language you cannot listen-check
  2026-07-14
  The quality gate I use for text-to-speech when no human can proofread the audio: synthesize, transcribe, score, gate.
• The judge was stale: how a frozen evaluator almost inverted a licensing decision
  2026-07-14
  Every quality score in my TTS pipeline comes from a model. Models age. Mine aged silently and nearly flipped a real decision.