Hello from Shell Game! I’ll get to the main topic of today’s post (AI voice agent as digital assistant) in a bit, but first a couple program notes. We continue to be thrilled and awed that more and more people are finding the show. It’s been hanging around in the Apple top 200 of all podcasts for a few weeks now, sometimes in the top 50. Those charts measure some alchemy of audience size and momentum, and it’s insane for an independent, no-celebrity, zero-marketing-budget series to have this much of either, more than a month after the last episode dropped. It keeps popping up in new places all the time.
More importantly, thanks to all of you who’ve signed up here, and especially those who have supported the show with your own hard-earned cash, I can now say that WE WILL BE DOING A SEASON TWO!
The exact story is still notional—we’ve got ideas, but they’re more the Post-its-on-the-wall type right now. Shell Game is broadly “about things that are not what they seem,” so we may range a bit. (If you’re familiar with any of my other work, from The Mastermind to my vanishing story to my reporting on con artists and organized crime, much of it falls within this tag line.) It will be another limited series, like the first season—one that we put months of work into before it hits your ears.
We are still open to working with distribution partners or sponsors in some forms, so if you’re one of those, get in touch! (To our paying subscribers: Don’t worry, even if we did that, we’d make sure that you would always get the show ad-free.)
In the meantime, I figured I should say something about what I’ll be doing with this newsletter / Substack—and what I won’t. I’ll keep posting regularly about further experiments with my voice agent, with bonus audio for the paying folks. (Yes, I’ve decided to keep AI Evan around, if you’ve listened all the way to the end credits and were wondering.) If you have requests, let me know. I’ll post some other original reporting and occasional analysis on relevant news—again, ranging widely across Shell Game’s theme, but obviously around voice AI for starters.
What I won’t be doing is sending regular round-ups of AI news, or shoveling out quick takes about AI developments, or interviewing experts weekly about where it’s all going. I’m not opposed to that stuff, and there plenty of great newsletters and outlets that provide it. But my expertise is in telling longform, reported, narrative stories. Every minute I spend churning out a take is one I’m not spending developing more of the type of Shell Game episodes that brought you here.
Apropos of all that, I’ve been working on a bonus episode that will go out to everyone, looking into a question many people have asked me: How well can an AI voice agent work as a kind of digital assistant, taking on everyday tasks for you?
Today, as a mini-preview of that episode for paid subscribers, I’ve answered a specific version of that question:
Can my AI voice agent overcome a bank’s voice verification technology and order me a new credit card?
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