Luke Oliff · Blog
Writing.
Original posts, published first on this site. Imported posts live in the archive.
SearchAI (50)API Design (13)APIs (23)Career (6)Community (1)Developer Experience (52)Developer Relations (2)Engineering (124)Fun (1)Git (12)Industry (29)JavaScript (6)Latency (2)Models (2)News (17)Open Source (19)Opinion (35)Pricing (1)Security (10)Speech-to-Text (9)Streaming (4)Text-to-Speech (29)TIL (110)Voice Agents (7)Voice AI (74)
260 posts
2026
Inference costs are dropping and that changes everythingOriginalOpenAI's custom chip, SpaceX compute deals, and falling token prices are pushing inference costs down faster than most developers have noticed.AI
Six stories shaping voice AI in mid-June 2026OriginalMicrosoft MAI-Voice-2, Google live translation, DeepL bought Mixhalo, and open-weight TTS models kept shrinking. Six stories from a busy month in voice AI.Voice AI
When speech-to-text hears something else entirelyOriginalThe funniest speech-to-text transcriptions from real API traffic: a meowing cat asking for help, a quiche that became keys, and why models guess.Developer Experience
Voice data residency decides where your agent runsOriginalVoice data residency decides where speech APIs process audio. Deepgram Australia went live June 17, 2026, shaping how teams pick STT and TTS providers.Voice AI
Streaming TTS: Rethinking the Voice Audio PipelineOriginalStreaming TTS changes what voice applications expect from audio APIs. Time-to-first-byte drops, complexity moves into buffer management and chunk boundaries, andVoice AI
A Rising Tide Lifts All BoatsOriginalA rising tide lifts all boats, but only if everyone has a boat. On neurodivergence at work, the user manual nobody reads, and being told to just figure it out.Opinion
Export Controls Took Down Claude Fable 5OriginalAn export control directive shut down Claude Fable 5 globally. The first government shutdown of a deployed AI model and what developers should know.AI
A Frontier Model Goes Dark, Voice AI Keeps MovingOriginalA frontier model goes dark: Fable 5 pulled 72 hours after launch by export directive, while Microsoft and Deepgram carried on shipping voice infrastructure.AI
Anthropic's IPO, NVIDIA open-weights, and AI's $36B betOriginalFable 5 ate the news cycle, but that same week saw Anthropic's IPO, NVIDIA's open model, and a chip deal reshaping AI finance.AI
When Your Drive-Thru AI Can't Understand an AccentOriginalMcDonald's killed its AI drive-thru in 2024 because it could not understand an accent. Two years on, the industry is still working out why.Voice AI