Leon

Someone published Leon on the well known Hacker News and it has been well received. Leon reaches the front page in the 3rd position for few hours, and then the 10th position for a full day.

6 days later — Leon’s GitHub repository is ranked at the 1st position of the main GitHub trending page.

I released Leon under the 1.0.0-beta.0 version on the 10th of February 2019. Leon has been warmly welcomed and this proves Leon has potential and there is a lot to do, together. My friends, an amazing adventure starts here!

24 hours later — Leon gets his first 100 GitHub stars and appears in the GitHub JavaScript trending page.
48 hours later — Leon reaches 200 GitHub stars.
4 days later — Leon has more than 400 GitHub stars.

At the end of June 2017 I moved to China and began my full-time job here. After some time, I decided in October to make a plan to work on Leon in a more dedicated way. I committed to a private repository on the 4th of November 2017.

A few weeks later I was thinking if Leon helps me, then it might also help others. So I decided to create a modular architecture.

Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook CEO published a note and a video about his 2016 personal challenge. I was very excited about the idea of interacting with a tech system by voice. Of course virtual assistants such as Siri already existed at that time, but the fact of reading about and seeing the Zuck’s assistant made me want to know more about it.

A few days later I was on a train on my way back to my dear hometown in France. I grabbed my laptop and started coding a proof of concept in an HTML file. My initial motivation was to understand how speech-to-text and text-to-speech were working in web development, so I implemented the Web Speech API and a few hours later I got my PoC done.