Two Features Walked Into My App. Only One Could Leave.
Late on July 13, TransLee could hear a quiet news broadcast through my phone’s own speaker and translate it live. By the next morning, that exact feature was silent. Nothing had touched the speaker-recognition code overnight. What had changed was a different feature entirely: translated voice playback had just started working for the first time. The Symptoms, in Order 03:40 — Speaker-sound recognition, which worked the night before, stopped picking up anything. 04:36 — Still broken. YouTube audio wasn’t recognized at all, and even the transcript-only fallback wasn’t translating, just showing raw text. 07:41 — Fixed the transcript-and-translation display. Recognition worked again. But the voice-playback feature, the one that had worked the previous evening, was now silent. 07:46 to 08:13 — Every attempt to get both working at once produced the same shape of failure: one sentence would translate and play correctly, then everything stopped, no more translation, no more transcript, sometimes a garbled half-second of audio right before it died. Five hours of this, with the failure mode staying identical no matter which side I patched. That repetition was the actual clue. This wasn’t a bug hiding somewhere in the code. It was two features fighting over the same microphone. ...