Ten years, including the parts that did not work.

The company was built on WebRTC. Real-time translation with sentiment analysis was part of it from the first release rather than a feature bolted on later. It ran as a full multilingual communications platform: voice and video conferencing with live translation and sentiment analysis, delivered across browsers, iOS and Android, with up to twenty-five secondary languages and an API and SDKs for integration.

The design was Mary Lee Weir's. Engineering was contracted, then as now. The sentiment work was researched and sourced directly from research laboratories, at a point when emotion metadata existed for only a small number of languages and there was nothing on a shelf to buy. What none of that supplied was the architecture: the thing that made a translation carry emotional content instead of discarding it. That was her conception, and it is why U.S. 11,587,561 B2 issued in her name.

The company took it to market. Real-time translation was demonstrated live, exhibited, covered by press, and pursued commercially in the United States and internationally.

The patent was not the plan. It was born from the work itself. The method it claims had been engineered, run and proven inside a live product before the application was filed in October 2019. The invention existed first. The filing described what already worked.

Retiring the platform was a decision, not a failure to continue. Eight years of building it had established what it could not do: carry the part of a message that sits underneath its words. That question outlived the product. The vision of what comes next is the work that continues.