Hey everyone! 👋 A lot of you probably noticed I’ve been quiet and disappeared from the group for the past couple of weeks. I wasn't slacking off — I was locked in my room, building something from scratch that kept me up late at night. Here’s the raw story: Recently, a writer and creator friend came to me completely burned out: “I want to produce my own audiobooks and podcasts, but every time I open Audacity or Pro Tools, I feel overwhelmed by technical jargon, noise gates, and mastering curves. I don’t have weeks to learn audio engineering, and I flat out refuse to burn $50 every month on cloud AI subscriptions just to turn my words into speech.” That problem bugged me. Why does a storyteller need to become an audio engineer just to release an audiobook? And why should creators be forced to upload their confidential manuscripts to third-party cloud servers with zero privacy? So, after a deep brainstorming session, we came up with a crazy simple question: 👉 “What if voice acting, emotions, and pacing could be directed directly inside the text... using simple emojis?” I decided to stop talking and start coding. I engineered the entire engine in Rust from the ground up — lightweight, blazing fast, and 100% offline. Today, it’s officially live. It’s called Audioticon. How it works: - 🤫 Need a quiet whisper? Add an emoji. - 💥 Shouting, anger, or high tension? One emoji. - 📱 Phone filter or walkie-talkie effect? Handled by emoji. - ⏸️ A dramatic breathing pause? Defined naturally in the text. - 🎙️ Automated ACX & Audible Mastering: Automatically hits -23 to -19 dB RMS and -3 dB True Peak standards with a compliance certificate. - 🔒 100% Offline & Private: Zero cloud dependencies, zero monthly bills. Runs completely local on your machine. 🎁 Giving back to this community (10 Free Lifetime Solo PRO Licenses): The base version of Audioticon is 100% free to download here: 👉 https://viper-evo-studio.itch.io/audioticon

I’m based in Tokyo and spend most of my time around software, AI, and business. Always interesting seeing what gets built in the US. Different speed, different market, sometimes a totally different way of doing things. For people here running a company in the US, what are you working on these days? Could be SaaS, AI, e-commerce, local business, anything really.