{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "coverImage": {
    "$type": "blob",
    "ref": {
      "$link": "bafkreidxpw3g2j4vrjfzktbcbaza6gdwjq66atb33w2ew4uifx4fxu5wpq"
    },
    "mimeType": "image/png",
    "size": 80019
  },
  "description": "Calling vals with GPT Realtime 1.5, NYC doorman, email and voice agents, and more",
  "path": "/talk-of-the-town-mar-2026",
  "publishedAt": "2026-03-26T00:00:00.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:a2rdzfdxkjwerrfrpbwcipb2/site.standard.publication/3jd443afc2222",
  "textContent": "This month: calling vals with OpenAI Realtime, a Blade Runner Esper machine, an\nNYC doorman, tracking electricity pricing and D.C. water quality, a millennial\ncore tech quiz, learning web development in Val Town, and much more.\n\nWe recorded a video walkthrough of this blog post, like the old newsletter\nvideos Steve used to record, if you prefer watching to reading. (Thanks to\nCassidy for the\ninspiration to reprise the video format!)\n\n<iframe\n  src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/mKXoAVVrlXc?si=4iixkgcqAJQhlM1t\"\n  width=\"100%\"\n  style=\"aspect-ratio: 16 / 9;\"\n  title=\"YouTube video player\"\n  frameborder=\"0\"\n  allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\"\n  referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\"\n  allowfullscreen\n></iframe>\n\n<hr />\n\nJustin Uberti, creator of WebRTC and head of\nRealtime AI at OpenAI, built a\nhello-realtime val to demo\nOpenAI's new  model. You can literally call the val! (As in\n\"call the function\" but also \"call your mother.\")\n\n<div style=\"display: flex; justify-content: center;\">\n  <blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\">\n    <p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">\n      Just released gpt-realtime-1.5 with improved intelligence, instruction following, and voice quality.<br>\n      Try it out today at <a href=\"https://t.co/td6Cx2EOPO\">https://t.co/td6Cx2EOPO</a> (or call 425-800-0042)!\n      <a href=\"https://t.co/z8BtUMYSJ4\">https://t.co/z8BtUMYSJ4</a></p>&mdash; Justin Uberti (@juberti)\n      <a href=\"https://twitter.com/juberti/status/2026038008240337101?refsrc=twsrc%5Etfw\">February 23, 2026</a>\n  </blockquote>\n</div>\n<script async src=\"https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"></script>\n\nJustin's val inspired us to buy our own phone line: 1-304-VAL-TOWN. We haven't\ndecided what to do with it just yet...a new kind of val\ntrigger? A traditional customer support\nline? A talking Townie?\n\n<hr />\n\nPaul Kinlan, Chrome DevRel Lead at Google,\ncreated a personal assistant\nemail-agent val using Val Town\nemail and SQLite, Deno sandboxes, and the Claude Agent SDK. It's live at\nmemory-do.val.run.\n\nPaul also wrote a\ncolourful-scrollbar\nval using the new(ish) CSS  rule (Baseline as of 2024) and\nscroll-driven animations, which you can play with at\ncolourful-scrollbar.val.run, and an\nesper val that uses\nWebSpeechRecognition and Gemini models to enhance images, as an homage to Blade\nRunner's Esper machine.\n\n<div style=\"display: flex; justify-content: center;\">\n  <blockquote\n    class=\"bluesky-embed\"\n    data-bluesky-uri=\"at://did:plc:pyiweakbkw2vqgku25f5fy5u/app.bsky.feed.post/3mficxi556s2r\"\n    data-bluesky-cid=\"bafyreicychomlr3usibkdxvfpo6uz6rsoidtcxlfxwre4em4aaqatr7nia\"\n    data-bluesky-embed-color-mode=\"system\"\n  >\n    <p lang=\"en\">\n      I am creating a post about using voice as my primary input with LLMs and I remembered Blade Runner&#x27;s Esper machine. I thought it&#x27;d be fun to replicant\n\n      👉 WebSpeechRecognition\n      👉 Gemini Flash Lite for Voice to UI \n      👉 Gemini Nano Banana to &quot;Enhance&quot;\n      👉 Built with voice\n\n      Clone 👉 val.town/x/paulkinlan...<br><br>\n      <a href=\"https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:pyiweakbkw2vqgku25f5fy5u/post/3mficxi556s2r?refsrc=embed\">[image or embed]</a>\n\n</p>\n    &mdash; Paul Kinlan (<a href=\"https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:pyiweakbkw2vqgku25f5fy5u?refsrc=embed\">@paul.kinlan.me</a>)\n    <a href=\"https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:pyiweakbkw2vqgku25f5fy5u/post/3mficxi556s2r?refsrc=embed\">February 22, 2026 at 6:44 PM</a>\n  </blockquote>\n</div>\n<script async src=\"https://embed.bsky.app/static/embed.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"></script>\n\n<hr />\n\nFor our party at the Val Town office a couple weeks ago, we dusted off our \"NYC\ndoorman\" buzz val to let partygoers\nbuzz themselves upstairs.\n\n<p style=\"max-width: 400px; margin-inline: auto;\">\n  <iframe\n    src=\"https://player.mux.com/cu8C6t33EANBuOSi4Z2g3IOHYSqG00nCogdjK00ZurcEE?metadata-video-title=buzz&video-title=buzz\"\n    style=\"width: 100%; border: none; aspect-ratio: 9/16;\"\n    allow=\"accelerometer; gyroscope; autoplay; encrypted-media; picture-in-picture;\"\n    allowFullscreen\n  ></iframe>\n</p>\n\nAlso at the party, Charlie 'n' friends vibe\ncoded a silly party-val photo\nbooth. You can relive the party at\nhivecoding.val.run.\n\n<hr />\n\nJenn Schiffer (longtime Glitch community\ndirector / self-described \"glitch witch\") wrote a\npixelstats utility val to\nanalyze tiny pixel art images 🏙️.\n\n<hr />\n\nCole Lawrence, CTO of\nPhosphor and Forethink,\nbuilt an\nephemeral-links val\nat to6r.val.run for \"short links that self-destruct in\n48 hours.\" Cole also made a\nnewsletter-signup val and a\nrust-nyc-talk-submissions\nminisite val (hosted at\nrustnyc-talks.val.run).\n\n<hr />\n\nJosh Beckman at Shopify wrote a\ncomed-hourly-pricing-calendar\nval that produces an iCal calendar feed of ComEd electricity price changes. Josh\nalso made a criticCron val that\nemails critiques for new posts on his personal blog.\n\n<hr />\n\nDrew McDonald at\nWatershed made a\ndc-water-filter val that\nemails you if there's a DC water emergency in your configured home radius.\n\n<hr />\n\nPeter Liu wrote an\nimportLatest utility val that\ngrabs the latest version of an imported dependency val, bypassing the cache.\nThis is a nice DX improvement when you're actively updating both a val and its\ndependencies. Thanks to Peter for opening a pull request to add this to the\nupstream  library!\n\nPeter also made PineconeIndex, an\ninterface for Pinecone vector databases using OpenAI embeddings to vectorize and\nsearch.\n\n<hr />\n\nCam Pak wrote a\nsemantics-css-demo val\nlive at semanticsui.val.run for the nascent\nsemantics-ui npm package.\n\n<hr />\n\nPaul Chin Jr. built\nguess-that-hype, a\n\"millennial-core quiz about recycled tech hype\" (I scored a 3/8, very Gen Z of\nme). Paul also made\ndevfest26-raffle,\na groovy raffle website for the NorfolkJS meetup.\n\n<hr />\n\nceculbe made an\nhtml-css-js-template and\nseveral other vals like it for learning core web development concepts. I\nespecially love seeing Val Town used to teach programming, and one day we'd love\nto have a Val Town school (Val High?).\n\n<hr />\n\nkamalnrf built a\ngolinks val for personal /go links,\nlive at golink.val.run, and a\nsprite-playground val\ninspired by Josh Comeau's blog post on sprite animations.\n\n<hr />\n\nRaymond Camden wrote about\nUsing Val Town to Get Me to the Movies.\n\n<hr />\n\nCurt Cox built a\ncors-audit val that\nchecks the CORS policy of various APIs, live on\ncors-audit.val.run.\n\n<hr />\n\nTrevor Munoz created a\nlakeland-timesheet\nSlack bot val to track intern work hours on the Lakeland Digital Archive\nproject.\n\n<hr />\n\nCharlie made a\nself-improving-podcast\nval that generates a custom daily podcast in his Apple Podcasts feed, and\nmeet, a minimal personal booking website\n(live at charliechat.val.run).\n\n<hr />\n\nSean Peters made\nmarx, a personal bookmark manager val with\ntag filtering using Val Town SQLite.\n\n<hr />\n\nTomaso Valmax made\nbrain, a binaural beats val live at\nbrain.val.run (wear headphones for intended effect).\nTomaso also built shredreader, a\nspeed-reading app (100-2000 WPM), live at\nshredreader.val.run.\n\n<hr />\n\nChristopher de Beer created\nmental-models, a collection of\ninteractive mental models, and microgpt,\na minimal byte-level decoder transformer.\n\n<hr />\n\nI (Pete) made a\ncopy-sqlite-table val to\ncopy your account-scoped sqlite databases to a specific val (because now\nevery val gets its own database). Then\nNico remixed it to make an even better\nmigrate-sqlite val that fully\nmigrates tables, views, indexes, and triggers from account- to val-scoped\ndatabases.\n\n<hr />\n\nSteve (Val Town cofounder) is\nworking on vtrr, a Val Town React\nRouter framework with SSR and client-side hydration and navigation. The\naim is to find a middle\nground between 100% SSR (e.g. using Hono) and 100% client-side (e.g. with\nReact).\n\nSteve also made a\nx402-playground val and\nwrote a companion blog post about how the\nx402 protocol could make API keys obsolete. If\nit pans out, it could be like Apple Pay for APIs, moving you through the subway\nturnstile without ever stopping at the ticket machine.\n\nAnd one more: Steve vibe-coded a\nsteve-eval val to judge and\nrewrite LLM-drafted essays to match his writing voice. He wrote a blog post\nabout it: getting AI to write like me.\n\n<hr />\n\nSome developers in the atproto space (colloquially, \"the Atmosphere,\" best known\nfor Bluesky so far) have taken an interest in Val Town.\nTom (Val Town cofounder) wrote a\nblog post about the AT Protocol,\nmade an atproto-login\nval, and will be at ATmosphereConf in Vancouver\nthis weekend.\n\n<hr />\n\nIf you'd like to be featured in next month's Talk, share your vals in our\n channel on Discord!",
  "title": "Talk of the Town — Mar 2026"
}