In DevelopmentSocial Audio

Hearth

Live audio for loneliness.

Hearth Product

The Problem

Why This Exists

Loneliness is answered by products that optimize for engagement — profiles, followers, permanence, and a record of everything you ever said. They manufacture performance where what is needed is presence.

The Solution

What We Built

Three ways in. Campfire puts you in a small group of strangers with a fixed end time and something to do together. Ember is an AI voice companion for 2am, built as a bridge back to people rather than a replacement for them. Listen, coming later, is ambient human presence with nothing asked of you.

Capabilities

Key Features

Campfire — a small group of strangers, a fixed end time, and karaoke, a question round, or quiet company
Ember — an AI voice companion for the hours when no humans are around
Listen — ambient human presence, planned
Nothing is recorded
No profiles, no followers, and no way to find someone you spoke to before
Handles rotate and every room ends
Anything you keep for yourself stays on your phone
Native iPhone and Android apps at feature parity

Technology

Tech Stack

TypeScriptFastifyPostgreSQLPrismaRedisLiveKitGemini LiveDeepgramKotlinSwiftUIAWS CDKVitest

Architecture

System Design

01

Voice relayed live through self-hosted LiveKit and never written to disk, over a schema that deliberately stores no conversations — there is nothing to hand over

02

Four purpose-built agents, each running as its own worker process and joining rooms as a bot participant

03

Ember on native speech-to-speech through the Gemini Live API, with no STT and TTS pipeline in between

04

Guardian holding a rolling sixty seconds of transcript for classification, then discarding it, and never speaking

05

Jukebox publishing server-side audio as a single LiveKit track, keeping karaoke in sync without trusting client clocks

06

Agent decision logic extracted from the transport layer, so room behaviour is unit-testable without a live room

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