The day read-aloud went live, the box in the basement did the whole thing by itself. It drew a picture, looked at it, described what it saw and read the description out loud. Four models on one mini PC, no cloud. It was exactly what I set out to build.
Then it pronounced its own name "rah-BIN."
I asked the phonemizer what it thought the word was. It said ɹˈæbɪn, the vowel in "cat." That's how any English reader would say that spelling. The machine got the rules right and the answer wrong.
So I taught the computer to misspell its own name so it would say it correctly. The page still says RabinAI. On the way to the synthesiser, a regex quietly rewrites it to "Raybin." That comes out as ɹˈAbɪn, and now it says the name right. You hear the truth because the machine was handed a fiction.
The fix worked, and it also broke something. Every fix does.
The regex matches the bare word. It has to, because the model says "Rabin" on its own all the time. A smarter regex would guess at context and guess wrong somewhere else. So the fix is simple and a little too broad. I knew that when I shipped it, because the AI helping me write it told me.
That's most of engineering, and nobody puts it in the demo. You don't get to be correct everywhere. You fix the case that happens on every reply and knowingly break one that might never happen. Then you write down which one you broke, because a trade-off nobody remembers making is just a bug.
I didn't find the one I broke. The AI did. Before I'd even asked, it pointed out that the regex would catch a real person: Yitzhak Rabin — prime minister of Israel, Nobel Peace Prize, assassinated in 1995. Ask my assistant about him, click the speaker button, and it will confidently call him Raybin, with his name spelled correctly on the screen right next to it.
Then it weighed the odds, completely straight-faced, more or less: but what are the chances someone asks a cheese site about a 1990s Israeli prime minister and hits play?
It wasn't joking. It was doing risk assessment. It found the blast radius, measured it and reported back in the same flat tone it uses for everything. It had no idea it was funny, and that's why it was.
This is a machine that can't say its own name. I laughed and shipped it.
