Three weeks of talking to myself

By Georg Malahov

Three weeks ago the bot took my first voice note. Today is December 31, fireworks go off outside every hour, the family is watching The Irony of Fate, the Soviet New Year's Eve classic — and I'm about to record my year-in-review. Into the journal, where else.

The habit stuck faster than I expected. Notes get recorded from the car while I wait for my family outside a store, from the playground, at night in a whisper when everyone's asleep. Yesterday in Potsdam, where we'd gone to walk around the palaces and parks, I was once again muttering a note as I walked, and my wife watched me and smiled: "When you talk to yourself, you always look so happy." That might be the best summary of these three weeks: the conversation with myself has become daily, and I like it.

Ideas are already swarming around the tool — not all of them mine. A friend I was discussing the bot with on the road suggested an Apple Watch app: a button on the watch face, press it, talk — and the note flies off to the bot, no taking out or unlocking the phone. That lands exactly on what bothers me most: the path to recording is still too long. I also showed the journal to a beginning programmer I tutor — I think he was impressed. And the main internal battle I won a couple of days ago: I stopped endlessly improving it and now write ideas down in the task list instead of starting on each one right away. How the journal works inside, I've already described.

This morning I finally got to something long planned: recording a video. I drafted a script with ChatGPT so I wouldn't be improvising on the fly and losing the thread, and recorded about ten minutes — how notes get into the journal and how they can be browsed afterwards in structured form. Sent it out to friends. One watched it immediately and replied, half an hour later we were on a call — though the conversation came out choppy, since I was simultaneously combing the city for a present for my daughter. But the fact itself means a lot to me: for three weeks only I had seen the tool, and now someone looked at it from the outside. Maybe one of my friends will want to set up the bot for themselves — then for the first time the database will hold notes that aren't just mine, and it'll become clear whether this works for anyone besides me.

But for now — the year-in-review. Usually mine either never gets written at all, or gets patched together after the fact in January. This time I want to record it today, starting from March, month by month, so that it exists in writing before 2024 is over — and this is the first real job for the journal: not catching a thought on the run, but assembling an entire year. The next review, a year from now, should be assembled not from memory but from the notes.