XDA - AI tools

Voicebox cloned my voice from a few seconds of audio on my own PC, and it's the most terrifying thing I've seen local AI do

Abhinav Raj — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 23:00:18 GMT

A few months ago, when Kyutai released Pocket TTS, I was able to clone my own voice from a 5-second-long clip, which was an experience that left me wondering just how fragile the voice-based identity checks at banks and insurers had become. The barrier to access was so low that anyone with a PC and an internet connection could've followed the same steps and reached the same outcome.

I connected Claude Code to Mermaid, and it replaced every diagramming app I ever used

Nolen Jonker — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 21:30:18 GMT

Diagramming sounds like one of those tasks that should be quick, until you're trying to nudge the fourth box in place with arrows that refuse to line up, and 20 minutes have passed. Handing all that work to Claude is the obvious solution to the problem. This is exactly what I've been doing to get my diagram elements to line up perfectly in no time, and then I just save the files straight to my vault and open them in Obsidian Canvas or with the Excalidraw plugin.

Anthropic reveals Claude Haiku 5.5, its cheapest and fastest small model yet

Simon Batt — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 21:08:45 GMT

Anthropic has been moving pretty quickly lately. Only yesterday did it announce a Google Workspace plugin that lets you invoke Claude in a sidebar to help you get your work done. Now, the company has announced that it's releasing the cheapest, fastest light model yet with Claude Haiku 5.5.

GPT-6's new feature adds interactive elements to your chat, even if you're a free user

Simon Batt — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 19:41:35 GMT

One thing I really enjoy when using Gemini is the little interactive elements it will generate at times. I don't even need to ask for one; I'll ask for an overview comparing two things, or explaining a complex topic, and it will automatically generate a fun little diagram or chart I can click on to understand it more easily.

I connected my local LLM to Discord, and now I can reach it from anywhere without opening a single port

Joe Rice-Jones — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 14:30:16 GMT

I've spent a lot of time making my local LLMs faster. I run Lemonade on a Strix Halo box in my home lab, and it's genuinely quick, but every way to talk to it from outside my house meant homework. A reverse proxy and a certificate, a forwarded port I'd rather not open, or a VPN client I had to remember to switch on before asking a simple question.

I put Claude Opus 5.5 against Gemini 3.1 Pro on 3 everyday prompts, and I'm ready to pay for one less subscription now

Abhinav Raj — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 11:30:17 GMT

It's hard to imagine productivity without a little bit of AI magic these days. Most developers, designers, advertisers, and content creators swear by at least one model in their workflow, and most of the time, rarely ever see any reason to make a switch. That's because when you're a paying customer, you're subscribed to an entire AI ecosystem, and letting go of one ecosystem in favor of another is a migration hassle that no one wants to go through.

Claude can now access your Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides with minimal effort

Simon Batt — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 03:24:53 GMT

If you want to get a lot done within Google's productivity ecosystem, but you'd rather use Claude to get the job done, Anthropic has just announced the ideal solution for you.

I let Codex take over a project Claude Code couldn't finish, and it caught issues Claude missed

Nolen Jonker — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 23:00:19 GMT

Whenever Claude Code finishes a build, it will let you know, and the file usually opens and will mostly work. What it doesn't tell you is what's off with the first look, and if you don't actually write code, like me, then there isn't much to check it against. Reading line by line isn't realistic for me so I have to rely on testing the build and asking the agent what's happening underneath.

I had Claude look into my Windows 11 PC, and it revealed problems I didn’t know I had

Abhinav Raj — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 16:30:21 GMT

The Windows Event Viewer logs aren't something happy users of Windows 11 open very often, and when they do, they often don't find all the information there digestible or immediately actionable. The problem is that most of it is generally noise, so if you're looking for a specific error after a crash, you can be left jumping from one timestamp to the next before you get close to the root cause.

NotebookLM's new study features cost $0 and outperform apps people pay $15 a month for

Mahnoor Faisal — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 14:31:17 GMT

No matter how many AI tools I try (which, I can tell you, is a lot), NotebookLM has a special place in my heart. It ticks all the right boxes, has features I instinctively reach for when I'm studying or researching, and has slowly become one of those rare all-rounder tools that I don't have to force into my workflow.