Previous posts in this series covered the infrastructure: running three AI models sequentially on one server and why I run speech-to-text locally instead of calling a cloud API. This one is about the business problem I'm building toward.
The problem
I run a solo consulting practice. Client communication arrives over three channels: phone calls (including voicemails I check hours later), messaging apps, and email. None of these talk to each other.
After a busy stretch, I found myself doing a manual audit: scrolling back through four or five apps, trying to reconstruct what commitments I'd made, who I hadn't responded to, what questions were still open. It's time-consuming and I kept missing things.
The expensive miss is a phone call. Someone calls, leaves a voicemail, doesn't follow up in email. If I'm mid-task when the call comes in and don't process the voicemail until the next day, that lead has likely moved on. Industry data suggests small businesses miss 40–60% of incoming calls. I don't know exactly what my number is, but I've been that business.
