Big week. Google slipped a proper AI video editor into the app that already holds all your photos, a free Chinese model gatecrashed the top of the coding charts, and the EU told Google to unlock Android for everyone else.

Here's what we're covering:

Let's dive in 👇

I’m still always struck with just how quickly AI is improving.

Not just in the "look what it can do" sense (although the reasoning and, creative output quality is now EXCELLENT), but in the fact that one person can now build things that, only a couple of years ago, would've needed a whole team and a serious budget. It's quite an exciting time to be someone who enjoys solving problems.

Voco is the thing one of the things lol I’ve been building this year.

The idea didn't actually start with technology. It started in church.

Whenever we'd visit my wife's family in Mexico, she'd spend half the service whispering translations into my ear so I could follow along. Then when her parents came to England, the roles reversed. We laughed about it, but I remember thinking, there has to be a better way.

So I built one (after I’d tried google translate and other simple apps etc).

Voco allows churches to offer live translation that people can read, or even listen to, on their own phone in just a few minutes. Human interpreters are still the gold standard, but many churches simply don't have that option. My hope is that Voco helps remove one more barrier that keeps people from fully engaging with church.

If you're curious, I'd genuinely love you to have a look around here or share it perhaps in a Churches together group - voco.church

I'm not really after praise (although it never hurts haha). I'm after honest feedback.

Does it make sense? Is anything confusing? If you've ever used another translation tool, what do you wish it did better?

I'd love to build something that genuinely serves churches well, and those conversations are often where the best ideas come from.

I'm also trying to dream up some adverts for it. Part of me thinks I should make sensible demo videos. The other part wants to make something completely unexpected. One idea involves pastors being "held hostage" by groups demanding sermons in different languages before Voco comes to the rescue. It either sounds hilarious or completely ridiculous... and I'm honestly not sure which! If you've got a better idea, send it my way.

One thing I'm especially excited about is making Voco more than just a translation tool. I'd love it to become something that quietly helps churches notice and care for the people God is bringing through their doors, through analytics and fund ways to display data, kind of like how Spotify wrapped gives a fun summary of the year. It would be fun to do that for the languages used and people reached etc and share facts and info about the country and ideas of how to engage/reach out at specific parts of the year when maybe that nation has an important date. That's where my head is at, anyway.

As always, thanks for reading. And if Voco comes to mind when you think of a church or ministry that could benefit, I'd be incredibly grateful if you'd pass it on.

Stay blessed. Stay hungry. Stay conscious.

Josh

Google has slipped a feature called Video Remix straight into Google Photos, the app already sitting on most of our phones. Powered by its Gemini Omni model, it takes a plain ten second clip and turns it into something that looks properly made, with cinematic relighting, background swaps, and styles like watercolour or oil painting, no editing skills required.

The Details:

Conscious Take:

The clever move is putting it where our memories already live (I’ve used google photos for years), not in yet another app we have to remember to open. My main thought is how quickly a real moment and a remixed one stop looking any different.

Moonshot AI, out of Beijing, has released Kimi K3, a 2.8 trillion parameter model it calls the largest open model ever built. It shot to the top of a major coding leaderboard, beating expensive Western models along the way, and the twist is that Moonshot is giving the weights away so anyone can download and run it.

The Details:

Conscious Take:

The frontier keeps getting handed to everyone for free, and that is genuinely good news for anyone who is not a giant. Now to run it for free you really do need SERIOUS compute power however if you are looking for a very capable AI and hit your limits on the $20 plans with Claude and ChatGPT then Kimi’s paid plan will give you top-tier quality and way more capacity.

The European Commission has ordered Google to open Android up, forcing it to let rival AI assistants use core phone features and to share anonymised search data with competitors. The search data sharing starts in January 2027, and the Android changes land with Android 18 the following year. It capped a genuinely rough week for Google.

The Details:

Conscious Take:

Whatever you make of the EU, forcing the default open is in my opinion a good move. Whoever owns the assistant on your lock screen owns a lot of the choices you never realise you're making. This is a fight over exactly that.

If this email has been helpful, would you forward it to one person this week who might be interested? Thanks :)

"Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters." : Colossians 3:23

Build with the tools. But build for the right reasons.

Stay conscious,

Josh

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