About
I'm Rodney Woods, an AI engineer in Victoria, BC. For the last two years I've been building a fully offline speech and language platform (ASR, TTS, voice cloning, translation) for a low-resource language: data pipeline through model training, evaluation, and deployment, solo, on a single consumer GPU. Before that I designed, built, and operated a 250 kW GPU compute facility, also solo.
The through-line of this blog: generative models are useful exactly to the degree you can measure them. I gate every generated output with measurements calibrated against ground truth, because I work in a language I cannot proofread by ear. Most of what I write here is what that discipline catches.
Open source: local-tts-router, a multi-model local TTS router with automated round-trip CER quality gating.