Eighteen months ago, we thought we were building a simple voice memo app.

We were wrong about the "simple" part.

At Vomo, what started as a tool to capture and transcribe voice notes evolved into a full voice-first productivity platform supporting 50+ languages, real-time streaming transcription, and a growing number of enterprise customers with strict latency and accuracy requirements. Along the way, we learned a lot — some of it the hard way.

This post covers the engineering decisions we made, the ones that hurt us, and what we'd do differently. If you're building anything in the audio/speech space, I hope this saves you some pain.

Why We Built a Voice-First AI Tool