ProtoSpeech
ProtoSpeech
ProtoSpeech is a research & design studio building tools that are honest about what they do and respect the people using them — programming languages, communication protocols, creative tools, and open hardware, all shared openly.
Each project exists because something that should be simple isn't, something that should be yours isn't, or something that should be transparent isn't.
Most languages describe what you want, then a compiler secretly rearranges it into something else. Fudgel refuses that bargain — three sub-languages, each with one job, enforced by syntax. A slow program is a visible design problem, not a mystery buried in a toolchain.
Most compressors treat every byte the same. AIM decomposes data into what's structured and what's noise, building a mathematical fingerprint before choosing how to proceed. It beats gzip by 25–63% on audio and video, and correctly identifies when gzip wins on text.
Every major chat platform watches your conversations and locks your community into their ecosystem. Chirm is a self-hosted alternative built for the reading group, the game server, the neighborhood — communities small enough to deserve privacy and too important to hand to a corporation.
Email requires an entire infrastructure stack to self-host. Federation ties your identity to a platform. PING takes a different approach: one peer says "I have something for you," the other collects when ready. No accounts, no intermediaries. The sender can't tell if you ignored them or were just offline — and that ambiguity is the architecture.
Bring your own image, and the toolchain generates a 3D-printable relief roller in seconds. Print in flexible TPU, roll through ink, press to paper. It's not a plotter — it's a tiny printing press that produces output with the tactile weight of something that came off real equipment. The machine is open hardware you can build for free.
A local-first visual workspace where content lives in one place and gets referenced wherever it's relevant — never copied, never out of sync. Bounded pages force the organizational decisions that infinite canvases let you defer forever. Your entire workspace is a single portable file on your machine.
Animation, illustration, and whatever else escapes the lab.
Character animation, motion graphics, illustration, and graphic design — the visual and design work behind the projects, spanning several years across animation, game dev, and brand campaigns.
Visit ↗Standard doesn't mean optimal. It usually means first — or familiar enough that nobody reexamined it.
Every programming language, every protocol, every file format carries assumptions baked in decades ago — about how data should move, how code should be structured, how people should think. Most of those assumptions aren't wrong because they're malicious. They're wrong because they were never revisited. The tools got standardized, and the constraints they carried became invisible.
ProtoSpeech builds languages, protocols, creative tools, and open hardware that start by questioning those inherited defaults. The projects are different in scope and medium, but share a pattern: no black boxes, no lock-in, no intermediaries where none are needed — and a willingness to throw out the established approach when there's a better one hiding underneath it.
All work is shared openly under permissive or copyleft licenses.