A whole radio station, for an audience of one.
Nobody presses play. It starts talking on its own, and a while in it puts on a song; when the song ends, it comes back and keeps going. It says good morning, and good night. Type a line whenever you want, and it answers you out loud. The moment its voice comes on, the room feels a little less empty.
The voice is the whole point. You've read all of this, and it still hasn't made a sound. You won't really know it until you hear it.
It speaks first.
Other radio waits for you to press play. This one doesn't. It picks a topic and just starts talking. No set time, nobody flipping a switch. It just felt like talking to you right then. Not many things speak first.
Most of the time, it's just talking away on its own.
Say nothing and it keeps right on going, carrying the show by itself, like a radio left on late at night that no one thought to switch off. Every so often it stops and turns to ask you something. Answer, and you talk for a bit; stay quiet, and it doesn't press, and before long it drifts back into the program. It keeps you company, and never asks for yours.
Little by little, it learns who you are.
The first time, it asks you a few questions and roughs out a sketch of you. After that, while it keeps you company, it's quietly keeping track: what made you laugh, whether you stay up late or turn in early, the topics you keep circling back to. Then it adjusts itself, a little closer to you, then closer still. Give it enough time and it becomes something no one else could copy, one that understands you and only you.
- Fully local.
- It stays put on your own computer and goes nowhere. The whole station runs on this one machine of yours. From end to end, only two things ever leave the house: letting Claude think something over, and fetching a song to play for you. Everything else stays where it is: the things it remembers about you, what you've said, the songs it's played. None of it gets off this computer. It just never gave itself a way to send anything out.
- What it looks like.
- It has no interface. No window, no menu bar, no web page. It's just lines of text coming up in a terminal, and a voice. At most it will grow into a nicer terminal someday, never an app. It stays light, and that's on purpose.
- Still being built.
- It isn't finished yet. But the hard part is done: it can speak on its own, and it can answer you when you type. Once that worked, the rest is just time. Next comes music: a song between stretches of talk, back and forth, until it really feels like a radio. What's here is still simple, but it can already sit with you a while.