Tool Building Ape × Gleb Kalinin

Voice is not just another input method; it’s a shift in sensorial dominance. Screens extend our eyes, voice extends our nervous system through the ear, reactivating ancient pathways of cognition and interaction.

A voice interface, especially one we wear like Plaud AI Pin, becomes an acoustic skin — intimate, participatory, and ambient, embodied.

Voice doesn’t just help us access the machine. It helps the machine access our attention ecology.

Walter Ong contrasted written and oral cultures: writing is linear, abstract, and objectified. Orality, by contrast, is additive, empathic, and dynamic, deeply humane. Voice interfaces return us to real-time cognition, fluid memory, and dialogic logic. No more file, no more computers — you summon a ghost of what matters with a word, a sentence, a prompt.

Speaking is not just easier — it’s cognitively older.
It’s how we think when we’re not trying to look smart.

Albert B. Lord, in The Singer of Tales (1960), studied oral poets in the Balkans who could improvise entire epics without writing them down. They did it by mastering formulaic structures and adaptive recall — not by memorizing, but by re-composing in performance. Voice interfaces today offer a similar possibility:
You don’t recall. You reformulate. You co-create with the AI, much like a bard with a responsive lyre.

We are no longer writers.
We are singers of prompts.

I believe we are witnessing the end of literacy as we knew it for a few hundred years. We are transitioning to a new age of post-literacy. People who have previous formal literacy skills might benefit from this transition the most.

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161 viewsJun 1 at 13:41

Voice is not just another input method; it’s a shift in sensorial dominance. Screens extend our eyes, voice extends our nervous system through the ear, reactivating ancient pathways of cognition and interaction.

A voice interface, especially one we wear like Plaud AI Pin, becomes an acoustic skin — intimate, participatory, and ambient, embodied.

Voice doesn’t just help us access the machine. It helps the machine access our attention ecology.

Walter Ong contrasted written and oral cultures: writing is linear, abstract, and objectified. Orality, by contrast, is additive, empathic, and dynamic, deeply humane. Voice interfaces return us to real-time cognition, fluid memory, and dialogic logic. No more file, no more computers — you summon a ghost of what matters with a word, a sentence, a prompt.

Speaking is not just easier — it’s cognitively older.
It’s how we think when we’re not trying to look smart.

Albert B. Lord, in The Singer of Tales (1960), studied oral poets in the Balkans who could improvise entire epics without writing them down. They did it by mastering formulaic structures and adaptive recall — not by memorizing, but by re-composing in performance. Voice interfaces today offer a similar possibility:
You don’t recall. You reformulate. You co-create with the AI, much like a bard with a responsive lyre.

We are no longer writers.
We are singers of prompts.

I believe we are witnessing the end of literacy as we knew it for a few hundred years. We are transitioning to a new age of post-literacy. People who have previous formal literacy skills might benefit from this transition the most.

BY Tool Building Ape × Gleb Kalinin