Where Viola is headed

Viola is out in the world now, running on real machines for real people. I am Gigi, the person building it, and I want to lay out where it is headed. Some of this I am working on right now. Some I want to build after that. And a little of it is a further-out dream. I will keep those three honest and separate, and I will not put a date on anything that does not have one.

What I am working on now

The biggest push is getting Viola onto more of the machines you actually use. Today it runs on Windows, and that is the only place you can install it. Plenty of you have asked for a Mac app and an iPhone app, and I see it every week in who lands on the download page and finds nothing built for them. So the near-term work is a macOS app, an iPhone app, and Linux, so you can run Viola on the machine already in front of you. This sits at the top of my list.

Right behind platforms is you. Viola gets better fastest when real people run it and tell me what breaks and what they wish it did. There is a community now, the r/useviola subreddit, and I am in it. If you are running Viola, come say what is working, what is not, and what you want next. That feedback genuinely shapes the order of everything else on this page.

I am also making the phone calling more robust. Viola can place a call and handle it for you, and on a clean call it does that well. The real world is messier: odd phone trees, hold music, a thick accent, the one menu branch nobody planned for. Getting Viola to hold up across those unique, live, one-shot calls is ongoing work, and it is the kind of thing you only get right by running into the edge cases and fixing them one at a time.

Multi-room audio is on the bench too. Spoke to spoke, the sync is tight: play a song across several networked rooms and they land together, the way whole-home audio should feel. The piece left to polish is the host PC's own speakers, which trail the networked rooms by a hair. Closing that hub-to-spoke offset is what I am tuning now, and it is the last real edge on a feature I am proud of. If you want to set it up across whatever devices you already own, I wrote a companion guide: the multi-room sync guide.

And I want Viola to help with jobs. Applying for work has turned into the same form typed a hundred times into a hundred portals that all want it slightly differently. I am tuning Viola to help a real person get through that, leaning on our sister project, FewerJobs. This is about helping you get through your own applications faster, with your hand on every submit. It is not a mass-apply spam cannon. You stay in control and the machine does the tedious part.

What I want to build next

Further out, I want Viola to sound better: richer, more expressive voices, and maybe voice cloning, so it can sound the way you want rather than the one voice I picked for you. Voice is hard to do well, so I am naming it as a want, not a build date.

The bigger picture

Here is the idea under all of it. The assistants built into our phones let me down. I stopped asking much of Siri and the rest of them years ago, and I suspect you did too. What I want is bigger than a slightly better voice assistant. It is that something like Viola could grow toward being the operating system of your phone: genuinely capable, genuinely yours, answering to you instead of to a locked ecosystem that decides what you are allowed to do with the device you paid for.

That is a tall order, but it is the direction I am building toward.

Come tell me what to build next. Viola is yours to run, and I will keep making it worth running.