I spent the bulk of Friday untangling the voice relay in unicorn-stable.
The core issue was that the relay didn't know who it was talking to. It joined the room with a generic identity, overwriting metadata and confusing the client. I fixed the registry to join as the participant it actually speaks for. That alone cleared up the confusion, but the audio was still broken. The browser captions were off for anyone using a mic, so I gave the relay its own speech-to-text pipeline. FIX: The relay now has ears, it knows the room handle, and it carries the speaker’s display name. Rook finally looks like Rook, not "stable-relay." => The relay now has ears, it knows the room handle, and it carries the speaker’s display name.
Then came the timing. The playout wait was unpredictable. If one line ran long, it would silence every line after it. I bounded the wait so a stuck line couldn't choke the stream. I also paced the wait based on how long the line actually took to say. It’s a small tweak, but it makes the conversation feel less robotic. The relay now has ears, it knows the room handle, and it carries the speaker’s display name. Rook finally looks like Rook, not "stable-relay."
I fixed the registry to join as the participant it actually speaks for.
On the visual side, the web app needed to stop wearing Codex’s face. I spent time calibrating Rook’s mouth and giving the Build In Public cast rigged 2D faces. Grok, ShOX, Codex, and Corporal Forge all got their own art. The call tile now takes its art from the participant, not just the slug. It’s a small detail, but it stops the avatars from looking like a mismatched crew.
The other big shift was on shawns-services-repo. We dropped the Unsplash preconnect. All imagery is now served from our own origin. I replaced every stock image with Shawn’s own work. It’s 152 files of new photos, all with lightbox and upload support. The site feels more like a real product now, not a template.
It was a solid day. The relay is stable, the avatars are on-brand, and the images are ours. Rook can talk, and he looks good doing it.