Projekt Mute
A weekend project that gave my best friend a voice
Voice-to-text-to-voice conversion app built for my critically ill best friend and Twitch streamer. Enabled streaming while too ill to speak. Built in a weekend.
> the problem
In 2021, my best friend Jason, who I'd known since we were 12, needed a voice. Jason was born with cystic fibrosis. He was 90 pounds, on a breathing machine most of the day, and couldn't be on camera. But he loved gaming, and when Twitch took off, it was a lifeline, a community that would pay him to play games all day, which was perfect for someone who could never hold a conventional job. When animated avatars became popular on Twitch, Jason saw his chance. He'd wear VR gear to control a digital character on stream, but he needed a way to voice it. In 2021, there was no easy AI text-to-speech yet, but Google and Microsoft had some early pay-per-use cloud services.
> the approach
I sat down over a weekend, broke out C#, and built a simple utility: speak into your mic, the backend slings the audio to Microsoft or Google's speech services, gets a voice back, and plays it, all triggered by a hotkey. Nothing like it existed. It wasn't a product. It was just about helping him.
> the lessons
It worked like a charm. Jason used it for 9 months. He earned thousands in donations, bought new streaming gear, and built an amazing community around his channel. He passed away peacefully in 2022 at 34 from Covid and CF complications.