Ask Albert: the £100k solo build.

A voice-and-chat AI assistant, designed and built end-to-end by one person – and funded by investors at a ~£2.5M valuation. This is how the sausage actually gets made.

The brief was ambitious.

Not a chatbot. A cognitive assistant – something you talk to naturally, that manages the real texture of daily life: tasks, calendars, email, reminders, knowledge – by voice, hands-free, for people who are busy living.

The kind of product that normally gets a funded team of six. Here it got one designer with twenty years of UX and an AI-native toolchain.

The decisions that mattered.

Voice-first, not voice-added. Every feature was designed as a conversation before it was designed as a screen. That inversion drove the whole architecture: 39+ voice tools, each with carefully written descriptions so the agent knows precisely when to call what.

Trust engineered in. Anything consequential – sending, deleting, booking – goes through human-in-the-loop confirmation. An assistant people rely on daily has to earn it in the edge cases, not the demo.

A portable backend. Real-time data on Convex behind a clean API layer, so the product owns its future – the exact "no lock-in" principle every Zwartify build follows.

The outcome.

A production assistant, live at askalbert.ai, with an expanding capability set – and a £100k pre-seed at a ~£2.5M valuation for the company behind it. The build proved the thesis this studio runs on: one senior person with the right stack now ships what used to take a team.