We at Duvi are a team of technical people. We don't design by instinct or, to be precise, we didn't use to.
Somewhere along the journey, we realized that it doesn't really matter how cool the technology behind something is if people don't enjoy using it. We could build a great product, but if nobody is able to use it properly, understand what it can do, and actually get the most out of it, what's the point?
Steve Jobs has been a major influence on how we think about this. One idea of his has stuck with us throughout the process: you don't start with the technology and figure out what to do with it. You start with the experience you want to create and work backwards to the technology that can make it possible.
That's something we've tried to follow while building Duvi.
These notes are probably going to be a little random. We're pretty sure they're going to stay that way too. They're just a place for us to share some of the ideas, products, people and principles that have shaped how we think while building this whole thing.
Over the years, we've worked with and used some incredible products: Linear, ElevenLabs, Vapi, Raycast, Vercel, and many others. Even companies like Anthropic and OpenAI have influenced how we look at products today.
They've set a standard that is ridiculously high, but more importantly, incredibly consistent.
And there are things we love about each of them.
The restraint and attention to detail in Linear. The speed and simplicity of Raycast. The way Vercel makes complicated things feel obvious. The experience ElevenLabs built around something as technically complex as voice. There are little things across all of these products that changed what we expect software to feel like.
Some of those influences are visible in Duvi.
Parts of the layout and interface philosophy in Duvi Studio take inspiration from Linear. Our approach to keeping actions quick and interfaces out of the way owes a lot to products like Raycast. Vercel has influenced how we think about making technical workflows approachable, while ElevenLabs, Vapi and Deepgram have shaped a lot of our thinking around what interacting with voice AI should feel like.
Not every influence becomes a feature or a screen. Sometimes it's a spacing decision, an interaction, a way of explaining something complicated, or simply a standard we hold ourselves against.
So instead of pretending Duvi was designed in a vacuum, we'd rather acknowledge the people and products that helped shape our taste.
We tried to understand why we liked these products so much. What made them feel good? What made complicated things feel simple? What made us trust them within a few minutes of using them?
A lot of those lessons have found their way into how we design Duvi, mixed with our own ideas and our own way of doing things.
And then there's the other half of Duvi.
LiveKit and the wider open-source community, along with countless libraries, projects, discussions and people on the internet, have continuously guided us through building the technical side of the product. A huge amount of what we build today simply wouldn't be possible without people choosing to build things in the open.
So yes, Duvi was inspired by a lot of things.
But we don't want Builder Notes to just be a list of things that inspired us.
The companies and people we admire didn't just build great products. They put ideas into the world that changed how other people build. We hope that, over time, Duvi can contribute something of its own too.
We're going to make mistakes. We're going to build things that work and things that don't. We'll change our minds, throw away ideas we once thought were brilliant, discover better ways of doing things, and learn lessons that we probably could have learned much faster if somebody had written them down before us.
So we're going to write ours down.
As Duvi grows, we'll keep posting what we learn here. The technical decisions, the design decisions, the experiments, the mistakes, the things that surprised us, and the things we wish we had known earlier.
Maybe some of it will be useful to someone building something completely different years from now.
That would be pretty cool.
We've learned an enormous amount from people who chose to share what they figured out. Builder Notes is our small attempt to eventually give some of that back.
And hopefully, if we do our job well enough, Duvi itself will one day be on someone else's list of products that shaped how they think.