System · the eye, it sees

Lens

The interface: a single, calm orb.

Lens is the surface your team touches. Ask by voice or text; answers come back with their citations. Deliberately simple, so the product can evolve underneath without the surface changing.

Running today

How it flows

Voice · text · files
Lens orb
Broker
Cortex
Answer + citations
  • Voice-first, orb-centred. Minimal text, no chat clutter.
  • Every answer shows where it came from.
  • Stable contract: backends can change without touching the UI.

How it fits

Routes through the broker to Cortex, wraps voice via Larynx, reads knobs from Thalamus.

Under the hood

A thin, stable surface over swappable backends.

Lens is deliberately simple: a broker speaks one versioned contract, and adapters do the work behind it. The backend can be rebuilt without touching the orb.

The adapter chain · the backend swaps, the surface stays

Workbench
the orb
Broker
session · contract
Adapter
Cortex
grounded answers
Demo
offline corpus

The broker routes each session to an adapter (Cortex for grounded answers, or an offline demo corpus), and either can be wrapped with voice. On connect the backend announces its capabilities, and the workbench renders only those.

A voice turn · speech in, cited answer, speech out

Speak
STT
Larynx
Cortex /ask
Answer + citations
TTS
Larynx
Hear

Speech-to-text, a grounded Cortex answer with its citations, then text-to-speech, with transcription and synthesis handled by Larynx. Barge-in interrupts mid-sentence; in full-duplex live mode the engine can only reach knowledge by calling Cortex, so answers stay grounded.

A versioned WebSocket contract with capability discovery. The surface renders only what the backend announces it can do.
Swappable, composable adapters: demo ↔ Cortex, each optionally wrapped with voice. The orb never changes.
Grounded by design: even full-duplex live voice must go through Cortex's cited answers; it can't invent facts.
Proven end-to-end offline on a demo corpus, no backend required to run the whole surface.

The rest of the constellation

This is one part of a system built to keep one promise: every answer is grounded and permission-aware, or it doesn’t come at all.