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Deep dive · 04 — On-device ML

Our own product

Neural networks on the phone itself.

Our own product: real models compiled to the phone's Neural Engine, fed by a hand-written signal-processing frontend — ~200 ms to a result, fully offline.

fig. 04 · on-device path
device boundary · nothing leaveslog-mel frontendneural enginestructuredrecord~200 msdoc inputcompiled net
signal path device boundary result
Hand-written frontend · neural engine · nothing leaves.
  • ~200 ms

    on-device inference · zero server round-trips

  • Hand-written

    log-mel signal-processing frontend — not a library call

  • Fully offline

    nothing leaves the device boundary

The problem

The default architecture for mobile AI is a thin app in front of a server: the device records, uploads, waits, and displays. That costs a network round-trip on every use, fails without a connection, and — the part that matters most in sensitive domains — means the data leaves the device at all.

The approach

We inverted it: the entire inference path lives inside the device boundary. Real neural networks are compiled to run on the phone's own Neural Engine — the dedicated ML silicon already in the hardware — so the model runs where the data is, and nothing is transmitted, because nothing has to be.

The engineering

The frontend is the part most teams reach for a library to do — we wrote it by hand. The raw signal is transformed into a log-mel spectrogram — the time-frequency representation the network consumes — by our own signal-processing code, tuned for the device rather than adapted from a server-side toolkit. That hand-written frontend feeds the network on the Neural Engine, and the whole path — signal in, structured result out — completes in roughly 200 milliseconds, with zero server round-trips.

The figure above traces that path as built: the signal entering the hand-written frontend, the network on the Neural Engine, and the result — all inside the dashed device boundary that nothing crosses.

The same on-device stack also reads physical documents straight into structured records — the capture-to-structured-data path running under the same rule: on the device, offline, nothing leaving.

Whose it is

This is our own product — engineered, shipped, and maintained by us, not a client engagement. It's the proof that we build at the edge for ourselves with the same discipline we sell: when the data can't leave the device, the intelligence has to live on it.

The next build

Every system here started as one conversation. Tell us what your team does by hand.