My proposal is that we get some software working that produces poor quality speech in realtime on fast hardware that most people don't have. Then, improved search algorithms will bring higher quality.* The natural evolution of faster hardware will make it available to all. I think that we as cypherpunks have been thrown off a bit by the policy issues and the publicity we've received. It's time to get back into active development. Remember, architecture *is* policy! John * The way these algorithms work is that the sender goes through a laborious process to find the best "encoding" (literally -- out of a code book) that matches the sounds it is trying to communicate. Typically the quality depends on how much time it has to do this; spending more time looking at more possibilities, makes it more likely that you find one with a very small difference between the real signal and the encoded signal. We can start off with stupid algorithms that just give up and use the best-so-far when they run out of time, and gradually improve them to be more intelligent about the *order* in which they search. This requires no change to receivers; it's backward compatible.