ドミニク・チェン Dominique Chen
Fermenting Words: Announcing the Public Release of Oryzae
Writing has been near the center of my research interests for quite some time now. Keeping a journal is among the most private of practices, and yet also among the most dialogical. The fragments we set down on a page, when left alone for a while, begin to sound — even to their own author — like someone else's voice. Time, in a way, ferments language.
Together with my collaborator Yuki Agetsuma, I am happy to announce the public release of Oryzae, a journaling app that grew out of our ongoing research into slow, dialogical writing.
The name comes from Aspergillus oryzae, the koji mold that quietly transforms rice and soy across long stretches of time — those invisible collaborators we have lived alongside for centuries. The tagline of the project, "Aspergillus oryzae for words," names a hypothesis: that something analogous might be possible for language as well.
Continuing from Pickles
Oryzae continues a line of thought we began with Pickles, an earlier journaling service in which an AI returned a weekly letter, addressed to the writer themselves, distilled from the entries they had accumulated over the week. Writing, letting things rest, and reading back — separating those three temporalities, we gradually learned from our users, seems to give the inner dialogue a different kind of thickness.
In Oryzae, we have rebuilt the interface to sit closer to everyday life, while holding on to the central question: could an AI inhabit the space between a writer and their writing not as a summarizer or an advisor, but as another kind of fermenting agent?
What does writing mean in an age of generative AI?
In these years, when generative models are accelerating the speed of writing almost without limit, I find myself increasingly drawn, by contrast, to its slowness. The journal is among the slowest of literary forms, precisely because it presupposes no reader. Oryzae is not designed to make writing faster. It is designed to set aside the place and the time in which what has been written can mature.
Placing this kind of slow practice on the opposite side of the spectrum from efficiency and convenience has become, for me, one of the standing assignments of my work on well-being. Oryzae remains a small, experimental service. If you have the patience for that sort of thing, I would be glad to have your company for a while.
Something, I hope, is quietly beginning to ferment.