I too found this with their previous attempts.

I have my Chat personality settings stripped right down to no-fluff. I'd want voice to be more akin to the Star Trek computer, and less akin to as you said an AI friend, but previously it was tuned too personable/friend-like.

Funnily enough - I built this (delegation) over the weekend with Fable for a local voice chat running 100% on local LLMs, Parakeet and Kokoro. I say "...ask the thinking model..." and that redirects it to Qwen 3.6 27B on vLLM.

Can't claim originality though - it was inspired by Sesame - where their models will invoke a search, or check the weather etc, and make a vocalisation to keep you engaged.

Turn taking is one of the hardest things to get right for the exact reasons mentioned - but does seem to be the way that Claude.ai's voice works - in a very obvious way.

Anthropic + OpenAI both rug-pulled voices I liked and got used to and OpenAI really dumbed down their voices at the same time - Arbor went from Estuary English and almost "jack the lad" to some generic English accent. Claude had a Birmingham accent and said things like "shit", ending sentences like "So you're telling me that they asked for a 90% discount yeah?" - then it changed overnight to a mock Derbyshire accent with a dull tone.

ChatGPT's voice also gaslights me for conventional opinions - "my Eastern European neighbour helped me lift a wardrobe upstairs - something you just can't ask your typical neighbour neighbour"... then you get a full on left-leaning lecture from the safety layers rather than a head nod or "what luck!"

Claude + Sesame are nowhere near as overbearing.

In both cases - from edgy and engaging to something that just didn't gel.

The point of making my own assistant is that I can talk for as long as I want, episodic memory is personal and private, there's no "trust me bro, we're a big corporation" vibes.

This was not my first attempt - when I had a bunch of Opus credit around Jan/Feb - I tried really hard and created something that was not good enough. What I have now, is working, and each session is training Claude/Codex on what to tune, and to fix.

"Just had a convo - can you look into what happened?" And if it's one I don't mind sharing with the model - I'll say, "and what did you think of the questions I asked?" Sometimes it'll give a lovely commentary on how the model did.

af_heart is probably the smoothest voice - but yes it's more like another commented - more "StarTrek" than "telesales assistant that pauses and laughs at your jokes".

If you're on a similar path and want something full duplex - the go to solution is PersonaPlex from Nvidia based upon Moshi.

I think you're missing the counterfactual. I now have two choices: 1) sit behind my desk and work, or 2) walk and talk something out.

Before this model, the voice models were pretty dumb and annoying to work with. We'll see if this changes that.

Every time something along these lines is posted, comments like this show up.

The thing I don't get is...no one would say this about listening to a podcast or audiobook on a walk.

I'm not sure why people choose to demonize this specific use of time during walks.

Seems a bit knee jerk. I go on walks and bike rides all the time. A couple of times I’ve used voice mode and it’s been interesting. I could have listened to music or a podcast, listen to YouTube or just unplug. But every walk is different.

If you’re uncomfortable with this new world, and I’m sure I am even as I participate, you could tell us more about that?

Given the personality type common on HN, I imagine that the GP, even if unplugged from all technology on their walk, wouldn't be in a mindful state of enjoying their surroundings, but rather would be "lost in the clouds", stewing on the same ideas/thoughts/problems; but with those thoughts going more in circles, due to a lack of ability to verify anything.

Sometimes I want to learn something while I walk. Sometimes I want to listen to stories. Sometimes I want to just be present. All are good. I highly recommend letting people enjoy whatever they enjoy.

I often enjoy walking and doing something else at the same time. Usually thinking through a problem…

… but it sounds like they did enjoy the walk, doesn’t it?

I take my dog for walks everyday and I think she 100% of the times enjoys it but me maybe only 20-30%

One thing has remained constant over the last little period of time. AI boosters have zero taste.

I highly recommend not patronizing adults for doing what they want or feel is appropriate when they're walking their dog.

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Click through to the link, the answer is no it uses the latest gpt models now.

I also love exploring ideas like this. The problem that made me stop using Gemini is that it would always try really hard against all my prompting to ask a stupid question at the end of its response that would completely derail my train of thought.

You can start a chat in an existing session after pasting data into that session and it can then talk about that content. I haven't tried it with projects.

Yes, ChatGPT on iPhone.

Wait, you can talk to Teslas now? How did I miss thiS? Can I get a red led bar and basically have a KITT?

That is a nice idea and all, but perhaps there are things our friends aren't good at talking about. Perhaps something that is very related to a work project? Or like when I go down the rabbit hole discussing quantum mechanics and astro physics with ChatGPT because none of my friends understand that at even my level, and I'm looking to learn more about it from someone/something that does know more than me.

I'm looking forward to trying this out because I find that doing discovery on certain things feels more natural with voice. The previous voice chat was such a dumb GPT-4 era model that I resorted to using the dictate feature with GPT-5.5 and had it read the text response back to me.