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RecaliBRAINtion® & A.I.
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RecaliBRAINtion® Coach Michelle has been a life-long tech lover, embracing technology & AI, recognising its immense value, but has witnessed its shift from life-enhancing tools to, for many, increasingly destructive uses today. Social media feeds now flooded with low-effort, AI-generated content that prioritises quantity over quality. Craftsmanship is being lost to automation.
She does offer web design, Apps, blogs, info videos, language course, business training documentation creation & more but will continue to do things manually, ensuring fully bespoke and original thinking / products & services for her clients.
Here's why:
My Ethics Based & Mindful Approach to AI Today
Having witnessed the promise of early AI both in University research trials in the 1990's and in real lives at work in professional settings, I now choose to use it mindfully and with limits:
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Life-Enhancing vs. Profit-Driven, decades ago, AI tools like JAWS empowered my visually impaired colleagues to thrive, today, I see most AI use driven by convenience or profit rather than true life-enhancing impact, which makes me pause
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Protecting Brain Health, I value taking time to think deeply, digest ideas, and “sleep on it”, this not only nurtures my own neural networks, but ensures I create from the heart, investing in long-term wellbeing rather than outsourcing my creativity to prompts
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Authentic Creativity & Service, with an IT background, I’ve built websites, apps, blogs, infovideos, and designed everything from menus to flyers to business cards, all from scratch, while AI could speed things up and increase earnings, it would compromise my values of authentic living and genuine service, over-reliance on automation risks leaving people with “money but no time”, chasing the next buck while losing true customer connection
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Ethical & Environmental Concerns, AI systems consume vast amounts of energy and water for cooling, this conflicts with my ethos of caring for the planet, nature, and animals, for me, success is interconnectedness, so I embrace a “less is more” lifestyle, making mindful choices to live in harmony with my values
In many ways, my journey, from early AI trials at Essex, to witnessing speech software transform lives at Action for Blind People, to now choosing mindful creation, reflects my deeper belief that true progress comes not just from technology, but from living authentically, with heart, connection, and care for the world around us
1998 · Essex University & Voice Recognition Research
In 1998, as a Psychology then Computer Science student at Essex University, I took part in voice recognition trials exploring the use of neural networks for speech technology. At the time, Essex researchers and students were right in the thick of developing more speaker-independent, telephony-based recognition techniques, groundbreaking work that acted as a precursor to the AI-driven voice technologies we rely on today. Even in its early stages, this research was laying the foundation for tools that would evolve into the voice assistants, transcription systems, and accessibility tech now woven into daily life.
Researchers such as Daniel Azzopardi, Sharam Semnani, Ben Milner, and Richard Wiseman published a peer-reviewed paper titled "Accuracy improvements for speaker independent telephony speech recognition," presented at the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP) This, one of many key studies in this field, driving the innovation I was fortunate to be a small part of, but...
Context: What Was Happening in the Field
Voice recognition in the 1990s was rapidly advancing thanks to better algorithms and neural network research:
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Dragon Dictate, one of the earliest consumer speech-recognition products, was released in 1990
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Research into phonetic modelling using neural networks had already begun in the mid-90s. Gavin Cawley, for instance, focused on applying neural networks to phonetic modelling at Essex as part of his doctoral thesis in 1996
So by 1998, Essex researchers and students were right in the thick of developing more speaker-independent, telephony-based recognition techniques, work that directly seeded the AI-driven voice tech we rely on today.
2001 · Action for Blind People & JAWS Speech Software
A few years later, my career took me from the corporate world (where I had been a Web & Database Software Engineer at Harvey Nash, Europe’s largest IT recruitment company) into the charity sector. I joined Action for Blind People, first as a 3-day temp inputting data taking a huge professional step down, just to get a foot in the charity sector door, eventually becoming Database Marketing Manager in the IT department after building a database for free in those three days that enabled £3.1million in unclaimed Gift Aid to be reclaimed & going on to be listed in the 'Who's Who Of Marketing' UK(AFBP merged with the RNIB). I worked alongside talented colleagues, administrators, IT staff & designers, yet incredibly, many of whom were blind but fully capable in their roles thanks to JAWS screen-reading software. This was another example of early AI at work, where speech-driven technology broke barriers and created equal access in the workplace. For me, it was a powerful demonstration of how AI, even in its formative years, could be life-changing.
Legacy of Early AI Experiences
From university voice recognition research in the late 90s to professional practical accessibility tools in the early 2000s, these experiences gave me a front-row seat to the evolution of artificial intelligence, not as a distant concept, but as something already shaping real lives. These days are a different story entirely...
Thought-Provoking AI Videos
