AikaLabs Blog
Notes on voice AI, language technology, and building for the next billion users.
Latest8 min read
The wrong kind of conversation: why helpful assistants feel cold
An assistant that answers a complaint with correct advice is in the wrong conversation. A 1981 paper on advice-rejection explains why that feels cold.
Read the postvoice-aiconversation-designempathy
5 min read
Performance is accessibility
Most of the world is still on cheap phones and slow networks. Why page weight is an accessibility problem, and what it means to design for the 2G web.
performanceaccessibilityweb
5 min read
On Arm CPUs, 8-bit can beat 4-bit
A counterintuitive result for running LLMs on Arm servers: 8-bit often does prefill faster than 4-bit, and most builds leave a free int8 speedup switched off.
llm-inferencequantizationarmcpu
9 min read
Knowing when to talk: turn-taking and the Indian-language data gap
Voice agents interrupt people or leave them hanging. For Indian languages, the fix isn't a bigger model. It's the conversational data nobody collected.
voice-aiturn-takingindian-languagesspeech-recognition