Back in 2013, I built a prototype called Voicd for text-to-speech article conversion—basically trying to solve automated podcast generation before the tech was ready. Project died (was juggling Navy duty + a sock business), but the core problem stuck with me: how do you programmatically transform written content into listenable audio at scale?

The technical challenges then: TTS engines sounded robotic, no good prosody models, zero contextual understanding for pacing/emphasis. LLMs didn't exist. Voice cloning was sci-fi.

Fast forward to 2024: We now have neural TTS with emotional range, LLMs that can rewrite for audio consumption, and voice synthesis that's indistinguishable from humans. The infrastructure finally exists to build what I tried 11 years ago.

This is why timing matters in tech. Sometimes you're just too early, and the only thing you can do is wait for the stack to catch up.