Thor Schaeff

Schaeff previously worked at Stripe, Supabase and ElevenLabs. His professional timeline describes building developer experience and developer relations functions at Supabase, followed by work on ElevenLabs’ audio developer platform. At Google DeepMind, his focus includes audio understanding, speech generation and the Live API. These roles connect practical application engineering with teaching developers how to use a platform.[2]

Voice systems that keep listening

Schaeff coauthored Google’s introduction to Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.5 Transcribe. The Live models support voice agents that continue a conversation while external tools execute in the background. The announcement also describes visual context and incremental content updates, which let an application combine a live audio stream with information from other systems. His credited contribution is the developer announcement and its examples.[3]

Maps as a deployable file

With Brandon Liu, Schaeff wrote a guide to self-hosting maps with Protomaps and Supabase Storage. It starts with a selected geographic area, packages map tiles into a static PMTiles file, and renders that file with MapLibre. The tutorial then adds an Edge Function to restrict access. This makes the map’s storage and authorization behavior visible in ordinary web application code.[4]