Building @IzwiAI - Private Voice AI Runtime
Joined July 2009
- Tweets 18,281
- Following 1,428
- Followers 1,933
- Likes 19,853
228 Photos and videos
Pinned Tweet
Apr 20
300 GitHub stars for @IzwiAI
1200 Downloads 🚀
I strongly believe voice AI will be huge in the next few years.
Izwi's goal is to be the default voice AI runtime for private deployments.
github.com/izwi-ai/izwi
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Jun 2
The codex limits now are shit. I’m now exhausting the 5hr limit of the $100 Pro account in 5 prompts 😫😫
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May 28
AI models seem to have much shorter release cycles now. We used to wait a very long time between updates, but now new versions seem to come out every six weeks.
Introducing Claude Opus 4.8: it builds on Opus 4.7 with sharper judgment, more honesty about its own progress, and the ability to work independently for longer than its predecessors.
Available today at the same price.
ALT Benchmark table showing how Claude Opus 4.8 compares to its predecessor and to other models on tests of coding, agentic skills, reasoning, and practical knowledge work tasks.
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May 15
Voice AI runtime. Local first transcription, speaker diarization, TTS, and voice cloning with an OpenAI compatible API.
@IzwiAI is bringing Voice AI to your computers.
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Lennex Zinyando retweeted
May 15
Local-first engine for TTS, transcription, and voice AI
github.com/izwi-ai/izwi
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May 13
Building infrastructure without VC means consulting to survive. Every hour consulting is an hour not building.
Funded competitors sprint ahead while you're stuck in the consult-build loop.
Wouldn't have it any other way.
Heads down, back to building @IzwiAI.
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May 8
Every time I pitch @IzwiAI, people think I've lost my mind. "How do you compete with billion dollar labs as a solo founder?"
Simple: They are building for their cloud. I'm building for your local device.
As @jaltma says, there is massive alpha in being willing to look crazy.
May 7
There’s a lot of alpha in putting your ego aside by being willing to be cringe, willing to fail in public, willing to ask for what you want and face rejection, etc.
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Lennex Zinyando retweeted
May 7
There’s a lot of alpha in putting your ego aside by being willing to be cringe, willing to fail in public, willing to ask for what you want and face rejection, etc.
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Apr 29
Built Izwi for macOS first
Turns out 53% of downloads are Windows, 29% Linux, 18% macOS 🤯
Moral of the story: always ship cross-platform from day 1
Lesson learned: your assumptions ≠ your users' reality
github.com/izwi-ai/izwi
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Lennex Zinyando retweeted
Apr 24
🚀 DeepSeek-V4 Preview is officially live & open-sourced! Welcome to the era of cost-effective 1M context length.
🔹 DeepSeek-V4-Pro: 1.6T total / 49B active params. Performance rivaling the world's top closed-source models.
🔹 DeepSeek-V4-Flash: 284B total / 13B active params. Your fast, efficient, and economical choice.
Try it now at chat.deepseek.com via Expert Mode / Instant Mode. API is updated & available today!
📄 Tech Report: huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/D…
🤗 Open Weights: huggingface.co/collections/d…
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Lennex Zinyando retweeted
Apr 20
300 GitHub stars for @IzwiAI
1200 Downloads 🚀
I strongly believe voice AI will be huge in the next few years.
Izwi's goal is to be the default voice AI runtime for private deployments.
github.com/izwi-ai/izwi
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4
200
Lennex Zinyando retweeted
Introducing 🇿🇦MzansiLM, a new 125m-parameter decoder-only model pretrained on 11 South African languages!
📜 Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2603.20732
🤗 Dataset: huggingface.co/datasets/anri…
🤗 Model: huggingface.co/anrilombard/m…
This was led by @anri_m_lombard and co-supervised with @janmbuys.
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Apr 17
Only 4 more needed to reach 300 GitHub stars.
Tell a friend to tell a friend to try Izwi, the Voice AI Runtime.
github.com/izwi-ai/izwi
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Apr 15
At least we are not buying GitHub stars at @IzwiAI, we need a few more to reach 300. Go to GitHub and give us a ⭐️
github.com/izwi-ai/izwi
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Apr 15
Codex Plus is basically unusable for anything serious. We are being forced to upgrade to the $100 plan if you want to get serious work done, otherwise, you will be left behind. At least we enjoyed the subsidised tokens while it lasted 😂
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Apr 14
Being a solo founder in the age of AI is weird, you can do more than ever, but the real bottleneck is still judgment.
AI gives you leverage. It doesn't give you conviction.
Building Izwi has made that painfully clear.
github.com/izwi-ai/izwi
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Lennex Zinyando retweeted
Apr 13
1/ Every day, I get questions about what @IzwiAI is and what business we are in.
Short answer: We're building the private audio runtime for production voice AI.
Let me explain what that actually means 🧵
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Lennex Zinyando retweeted
Mar 18
I accidentally built a local AI inference engine.
Never intended to. Just wanted to test some models.
Now it has transcription, TTS, voice cloning—all running locally.
Writing custom Metal kernels to make it faster.
github.com/izwi-ai/izwi
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Apr 13
1/ Every day, I get questions about what @IzwiAI is and what business we are in.
Short answer: We're building the private audio runtime for production voice AI.
Let me explain what that actually means 🧵
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Apr 13
Give us a star on GitHub github.com/izwi-ai/izwi
Try the project and send me some feedback.
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