iyo started at google X in 2018 as a spatial audio and noise-cancelling device — best-in-class hardware. when LLMs arrived, the opportunity shifted: the novelty wasn't the audio anymore, it was AI. the bet became building the first AI-native earbuds — ones you could use instead of your phone, completing tasks entirely by voice.
the long-term vision was an audio OS with third-party developers building on top (a travel agent from booking.com, a note-taking agent from notion). but we needed to figure out where to start. after market research, user interviews, and conversations across the industry, we landed on an agent studio — a tool to create and configure voice characters, orchestration models, system prompts, and agent behavior. i scoped and shipped the studio alongside the iyo companion app, and set voice UX standards across the product org.
i also led ergonomic fitting — recruited a network of 300 audiologists to support proper earbud fitting for early users.
tradeoffs approaching TED. limited time, hard choices between polish and learning. ran a closed-access beta with explicit "this is beta" framing, gathered usage signals throughout. met the deadline; the data shaped the next roadmap phase.