Passing the third floor, Liam and Director Kai tried to poke their heads in, clearly fishing for clues about this new project Nick had teased.
Nick played it cool, ignoring their lingering glances and ushering everyone toward the fourth floor. There wasn't anything inherently "top secret" on three; it was mostly just the Cluster Tech team. But as he'd said, that area was cluttered with blueprints and data related to their upcoming August debut.
Liam and Director Kai were absolute sharks. Nick knew that if he let these wily old foxes see even a scrap of the new project, they'd figure out the angle in seconds. This project was still in its infancy, and he wasn't about to let the Air Force Equipment Research Institute "borrow" his latest breakthroughs before he even had a chance to show them off. If they "leveraged" his ideas now, he'd have nobody to blame but himself.
Stepping onto the fourth floor, the atmosphere shifted.
The space was wide open, divided by sleek glass partitions and dotted with indoor greenery. It looked more like a Silicon Valley headquarters than a traditional lab. The researchers were deep in the zone, barely glancing up as the delegation passed by.
"This is the heart of our operations," Nick told the group. "Right now, the heavy lifting is still focused on the H1 Intelligent Assistant's ecosystem."
The layout was fan-shaped, with R&D stations lining the windows and testing bays toward the center.
"We aren't juggling too many projects yet," Nick explained. "We're obsessively optimizing the H1's engine. Specifically, we're fine-tuning its ability to process regional accents, slang, and the nuance of human emotion—moving from basic sentiment analysis to understanding subtle or intense emotional shifts."
Garry nodded, his interest piqued. "The intersection of human emotion and linguistics is fascinating. How are you actually mapping that data?"
"Happy to show you. Follow me."
Nick led them to the testing area and fired up a massive wall-mounted LCD. "Sound alone isn't enough to truly 'feel' a user's state. We've pushed audio processing to the limit, but it has a ceiling."
"That's why we went with a wearable device rather than a standalone speaker. We needed a biometric bridge."
"As you know, heart rate is a telltale indicator of emotion. By syncing heart rate data with speech patterns—tone, pitch, and even the cadence of breath—we can triangulate a user's actual state. That emotional context then informs how the AI interprets the literal meaning of the words."
"And the output?" Garry asked. "How do you achieve that level of vocal realism?"
Nick pulled up a new schematic. "It's a feedback loop. Since we can accurately map the user's emotion and context, the system can 'mirror' that energy. It selects the appropriate tone from a massive library of templates."
"The more data it processes, the more it learns. It creates a more diverse range of tone profiles, making the synthesized voice sound less like a program and more like a person."
"That sounds elegant in theory, but the real-time processing must be a nightmare," Garry said. "I'd love to see the kernel architecture. Your security is ironclad; our guys back at the lab couldn't even find a way in."
Nick didn't take offense; he knew every lab on the planet was probably trying to crack the H1 right now. He tapped a few keys, and a complex 3D node map filled the screen.
It was a mesmerizing web of intersecting lines and glowing hubs, looking less like code and more like an intricate piece of high-tech geometry.
Garry pulled his reading glasses from his assistant's pocket and stepped right up to the screen, squinting at the nodes. Liam and Director Kai crowded behind him, mesmerized by the complexity.
After five minutes of silence, Frank's eyes went wide. He spun around, gesturing wildly at Nick. "You... you built the entire kernel on a neural network architecture! No wonder!"
"Let me see... you've got BP neural algorithms, fuzzy logic, K-means clustering... you even have deep learning layers baked into the foundation..."
As Garry rattled off the technical jargon, Liam and the others looked a bit lost, but they could see the Professor was vibrating with excitement. If this was enough to rattle a seventy-year-old veteran of the field, it was clearly a breakthrough.
"This is genius," Garry breathed. "Absolute genius. If you published this architecture, it would flip the tech world on its head."
Nick offered a modest smile. "I'm just trying to solve a problem, Professor. I'm happy to show you guys today, but I'd appreciate it if this stayed in the room. I'm not looking for that kind of spotlight yet."
"You... I don't even know what to say to you," Garry stammered, clearly stunned by Nick's nonchalance.
Suddenly, the Professor spotted someone in the back trying to snap a photo with their phone. His face went red. He marched over, snatched the device, and barked, "Who authorized you to record this? Do you have any idea what you're looking at? Where is your discipline? Have you forgotten every confidentiality protocol you ever signed?"
"Everyone! Phones out, now!"
Liam stepped in, his expression turning cold. "Hand your devices to my secretary for inspection. Every recording will be wiped immediately. Nick trusted us with this, and we will respect that trust."
"And when we get back," Liam added, glancing at the staff, "everyone in this room is writing out the confidentiality regulations ten times. Each."