Clarifying Speech: Lessons for AI from Creative Writing Class
Your personal AI transcribes and clarifies your speech to act as your thought partner when writing content
My sophomore year creative writing teacher gave us an illuminating assignment one day. She asked us to surreptitiously (privacy wasn’t on anyone’s mind back then) record a conversation among friends, then carefully transcribe, in excruciating detail, what everyone said. The main purpose was to understand the relationship between how people actually speak and how we think they speak or how authors narrate speech. The results were shocking across each and every example: The detailed transcriptions looked nothing like how we thought people spoke.
There is another deeper, more profound insight, which is that our brains act as filters on the world, and do so subconsciously. Indeed, what I would suggest is the most profound discovery from Psychology over the past 50 years is identifying the vast amount of work our brain does to understand the world without us even being aware. (The general insight is at least as old as Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, but it’s only the past 50 years where we’ve made significant progress in understanding how those unconscious processes work.) A concrete ramification: We thought programming a computer to recognize objects, the way humans do, would be a 20 year effort, starting in the 70s. (And actually, initially a summer project, if you can believe it!) How hard could it be, if humans can do it without even thinking?
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Fifty years on, we still haven’t quite figured out how to do so reliably attesting to how complex even perceiving a basic object is.
So, the way we communicate during spoken conversations is surprisingly different from the way we produce our written ideas. Our speech includes pauses, repeat phrases, filler words, restarts and interjections from others, some of which we’re aware of, much of which we’re not. This consistently makes the content of speech transcriptions difficult to read.
Your Personal AI Clarifies Your Transcriptions
That’s why we’ve focused on developing Clarify, an upgrade to your personal AI that stands out when compared to other natural language processing AI services. You can learn more about how Clarify works in our docs. Briefly, it eliminates restarts, disfluencies and interruptions and also applies a language model to improve the grammar and punctuation of your Memory Blocks. While it can be applied to any Memory Block, it’s obviously especially useful for Memory Blocks created using Sync Speech. We’ve also made clarified Memory Blocks available in the AI Messaging interface, to make it easy to find sources of inspiration.
Ambient Computing
Researched and developed by one of our incredible interns, Aidan Tan, Clarify is a critical part of our strategy to create your AI as an ambient computing system that lives alongside you, capturing your life as it happens, without requiring your direct intervention.
Ambient computing is what happens when the footprint of the human-computer interface (HCI) shrinks down to zero. Enabled by technologies like cloud computing, wearables, internet of things and advances in natural language processing and computer vision. It’s amazing to imagine that some have witnessed HCI advancing from punch cards to needing no visible direct interface at all to operate a computer. This is a core value in how we’re building Personal.ai: We want creators to experience the benefits of AI with negligible interruptions from their interactions with each other.
Imagine what this can look like in the wild: busy professionals in frequent meetings, academics debating with their colleagues, and creatives engaged in brainstorming sessions, ambiently capturing everything they say with their personal AIs without the need to interrupt their interactions to jot something down, taking them out of the moment; perhaps even without remembering their AIs are even there.
As an ambient computing technology, every personal AI powered by Clarify also enables the creation of juicier content that contains ideas we forgot we even said. In this way, our personal AIs are our thought partners that enable us to produce compelling content we can use to persuade a constituent, build an audience, create artful writing and more, beyond the limits of our human capacity.
