Nikonomics - The Economics of Small Business 280 - Best of 2025! Understanding the Nuances of Advanced Language Models with Richard Marmorstein
Feb 19, 2026
Richard Marmorstein, a software developer and AI product practitioner at Hume AI, demos conversational AI and expressive text-to-speech. He discusses custom storybooks with Google AI Studio. He showcases Hume AI’s expressive TTS and practical business uses. He explains differences between general language models and reasoning models and how AI can assist coding and content repurposing.
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Quick Custom Storybook For Kids
- Richard used Google AI Studio to generate a short illustrated story about a red dog to motivate his son at soccer practice.
- He exported images and narration into a printable book for personal use after a 45-second generation process.
TTS As A Language Model
- Hume AI's TTS model is trained as a language model that understands meaning, not just phonemes.
- That allows more expressive, context-aware speech than traditional TTS systems.
Enable Tool Use With MCP
- Use the MCP standard to let language models call your tools and access local files securely.
- Configure a small local server (Claude Desktop config.json) to expose your app or filesystem for interactive model-driven workflows.