🔊 Mike Onslow on Building Voice-Enabled Apps with AI and Getting Back to Your Code

At the July 14 VibeCoding meetup, Mike Onslow, CTO of Clarity Voice and co-host of the Artificial Antics podcast, walked us through a passion project that merged voice, AI, and rapid prototyping into one powerful showcase.

His goal?
To build a tool that could read articles aloud, summarize content using AI, and sync audio narration with on-screen text — all built with the curiosity of a weekend hacker and the discipline of an enterprise engineer.

📚 The AI Article Reader

Mike’s project accepted a URL, scraped the content with BeautifulSoup, summarized it using Gemini 2.5 Pro, and then generated spoken narration using 11Labs, complete with:

• Voice selection

• Topic tagging

• Word-by-word sync between text and audio

He used:

• Cursor and Replit for AI-native development

• Bubble to redesign and polish the UI

• Flask, Celery, Redis, and PostgreSQL for backend logic

• Gemini + 11Labs for summarization and text-to-speech

“I handed the code to Gemini and said, ‘Document this.’ It gave me a full architecture map and reintroduced me to my own app.”

🧠 From Code to Re-Discovery

After stepping away from the project for a month, Mike used AI to regenerate full documentation, including diagrams and a table of contents — enabling him to re-onboard himself without re-reading every line of code.

He emphasized the importance of:

• Version control for AI-generated projects

• Building modularly with backup and rollback in mind

• Learning by iterating, not over-planning

“I’m looking at code less. But I’m directing more. That’s where we’re headed.”

💸 The Cost of Voice

As someone building AI communication tools professionally, Mike gave a grounded warning:

“Text-to-speech and speech-to-text are always the most expensive AI services — even if you self-host.”

He praised 11Labs’ quality but noted it quickly burned through free credits, leading him to explore more cost-effective alternatives for future builds.

🔗 Connect with Mike

Learn more about Mike’s work at Clarity Voice, or tune in to Artificial Antics, where he and his co-host debate the cultural and technical realities of AI in today’s world.