Pacific Design/ artificial intelligence

section 08 · status: live · 5 entries · updated 2026-08-29

Speech & Audio

Audio went from the hardest interface to a nearly solved one in a decade. How sound becomes a picture models can read, why transcription got shockingly good, what voice synthesis and cloning changed, and the racing clock every voice agent lives under.

live · a waveform folded into a spectrogram, then into words

  1. How machines hearsound as a picture of frequencies over time
  2. Speech to texttranscription got shockingly good — measure where it isn't
  3. Text to speechvoices are now synthesized, cloned, and directed
  4. The voice looplisten, think, speak — under 800 milliseconds, interruptible
  5. Audio beyond speechwho spoke, who is that, and what just broke