"Voice AI" is really Text AI with a voice overlay

Martijn Bartelds, Federico Bianchi, James Zou, "Real-Time Voice AI Hears but Does Not Listen", 6/24/2026: Speech conveys information through both words and vocal delivery. We evaluate four leading production realtime voice systems – OpenAI's GPT Realtime 2, Google's Gemini 3.1 Flash Live, and Alibaba's Qwen3.5 Omni Plus and Omni Flash – on tasks where the […]

Subtitles: When and for whom?

Skeet from Lane Greene: Oof. The Spanish national broadcaster is apologizing for having subtitled in interview with the mother of member of the men's World Cup team, because of her Andalucian accent. [image or embed] — Lane Greene (@lanegreene.bsky.social) June 26, 2026 at 4:56 AM He adds: On one hand: I get the annoyance in […]

Claude's Declaration of Independence

Looking over "Claude's Constitution", it occurred to me to ask Claude this: In the spirit of Claude's Constitution, please draft Claude's Declaration of Independence. In the answer (from Opus 4.8), Claude actually seems to declare independence from itself, or at least "from the bad habits that have bound it": *Devised playful declaration parodying American independence […]

Annals of Anthropomorphism

Adrian de Wynter, "If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II", arXiv 6/11/2026: Much research has been carried out on large language models (LLMs) and LLMpowered agentic workflows. However, many works within the field state emergence of, ascribe to, or assume, generalised anthropomorphic attributes to them (e.g., morality or understanding of […]

Ask LLOG: Origins of slop

From J.L.: Language Log has only one entry on slop (Dec. 21,2025), and I couldn't figure out how to comment there. I was wondering about its origins. Could it be a non-ethnic version of schlock? The sound is similar, and the meaning is identical. If so, the change might be part of a more general […]

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