The Readable Web

  I have an AI voice. It's not my regular voice -  It's the voice I put on when speech-to-text is enabled and I'm about to give instructions to Claude, ChatGPT, or whatever AI I've summoned that day. It emerges automatically, like a reflex. Like how people talk louder on the phone for no reason. The AI voice has many variations. There's the Casual One, the Authoritative One, the Slightly Too Loud One (for when I'm in public and pretending I'm not talking to a computer). There's even a Polite One, because apparently I was raised to say please to a language model - eats up compute time I've heard.  None of them work very well. The ones that do work — the ones where the AI actually understands me — all share one thing in common: they sound robotic. Slow. Deliberate. Slightly dead inside. Like I'm reading terms and conditions out loud to a jury. "Please. Write. A. Blog. Post. About. My. AI. Voice." It works great. The transcription i...

  Am I the Dummy? I had a thought the other morning, standing in my kitchen in my socks, watching the coffee maker do its thing. My phone was on the counter, halfway through reading me back the email I'd asked it to write to my sister. The car was outside, having already pinged me about a brake pad it wanted me to know about. My fridge. Well, my fridge hadn't done anything yet, but only because I hadn't asked. Twenty minutes later it would tell me, through a recipe app, that the wilting coriander and half a lime and the leftover chicken thighs could become something called Vietnamese-style lettuce wraps. And I just stood there with my coffee thinking: hang on a minute. Am I the dummy here? Let me back up. A few years ago I started using one of those AI assistants for what I figured would be a one-time thing. I needed help cleaning up my resume because I was applying for a job that felt slightly above my pay grade. The assistant rewrote it. I got the job. Whoops, I thought. ...