Getting My Voice Back
On thinking more slowly, explaining more clearly, and letting AI help
I learned Adobe tools more than twenty years ago, back when video editing was a specialized skill and not something most people stumbled into by accident.
My first job in Seattle was at a company that made multimedia CDs. I worked on a team that built interactive cookbooks. The publisher provided the cookbook text and images, and my job was to parse everything into recipe software so the recipes could be scaled dynamically. It was work about structure and translation, and I loved it.
I shared an office with the people who edited the images and video content for the CDs. They spoke a language I barely understood. Frame rates, timelines, codecs. They saw the world very differently from me.
A few years later, I went to work for Adobe. Suddenly I had access to the very tools my former office mates had used. It was great fun to finally get my hands on them and understand what I’d been overhearing all those years. Even then, video felt deliberate.
Over time, those tools became far more accessible, but I still carried that assumption with me. Video was not something you reached for mid‑thought. It wasn’t how you explored an idea or talked something through. It was something you produced.
I still pay for the full Adobe suite. But even now, pulling it out doesn’t feel spontaneous. It’s not a casual decision to open it up and start explaining something out loud.
So when I decided to try Clipchamp, it wasn’t because I was looking for a new video tool. It was because I was curious whether video could be something I used, not something I produced.
I’d experimented with it once a couple of weeks earlier, creating a short video for my Substack. What stayed with me wasn’t the feature set. It was the lack of friction. I didn’t have to shift into a different mental mode or convince myself I was “doing video now.” I could just start explaining.
This past weekend, I was working through an idea I wanted to build. I wasn’t sure yet whether it was fully doable. What I needed first was to convince myself. I worked through the first phase slowly, enough to understand the shape of the system and where the hard edges might be.
Once I had that clarity, I wanted to share it with a couple of people.
Normally, that would have meant a live explanation. Me talking quickly. Skipping steps without realizing it. Filling in gaps silently because everything felt obvious from inside my own head. My thoughts tend to move faster than my words, and in person I often leave out exactly the details someone else would need.
Instead, I opened Clipchamp.
What changed wasn’t what I shared. It was how I shared it. I could stop when I noticed I’d jumped ahead. I could re‑record a sentence when I realized I was assuming too much context. I added subtitles, not as an afterthought, but as a forcing function. If the words didn’t make sense on the screen, they didn’t make sense at all.
There was another reason video worked particularly well right now. My voice still hasn’t fully recovered since surgery. Clipchamp has built‑in AI voices, so I used one.
That choice didn’t feel like replacing myself. The thinking was still mine. The structure was still mine. The explanation was exactly what I would have said, if I could have said it comfortably. The AI voice didn’t change the ideas. It removed a physical barrier between the ideas and the people I wanted to share them with.
I ended the video with a question for the two people I sent it to. Not a rhetorical one. A real question about how what I’d built landed for them. Later, I was told that stood out.
I’ve said before that AI is giving me my voice back. This time, I meant it literally. But what surprised me was everything underneath that. The clarity. The pacing. The ability to explain something the way I actually want to, without rushing past the important parts. The AI didn’t speak for me. It made space for me to be heard, at a pace that finally felt right.
Alison + Wiggins