Issue 01 · MMXXVI Aotearoa New Zealand Printed in two colours
Adventures in Comms

Field notes from a communications career that wandered into AI and started building things. I'm Will Edmonds. What follows is a record of what I've made, what worked, and what it taught me.

everything here is built & shipped

Will Edmonds
Fig. 1 The author, allegedly
Section 01

Who's speaking

My background is in communications, where the craft underneath everything is clarity: making complicated things understood, and helping people say the right thing at the right moment.

Then AI arrived and started rewriting how that work gets done. I wanted to understand the shift properly, which for me meant building with it rather than forming opinions from a distance. Most of what I make returns to a single question: how information moves, who grasps it in time, and who can afford the tools that were once out of reach.

The work is grounded here in Aotearoa, from local media to government communications to the housing market. Some of it is earnest, some of it is pointed, and all of it is built and shipped.

Section 02

Dispatches

Selected work, most of it built solo. screens & clips below

The Current — the Coverage view, reviewing stories matched to a client's monitoring
Fig. 2 Dashboard, in progress
Dispatch 01

The Current

A media intelligence platform for New Zealand organisations. One shared corpus of sources and articles, with a separate layer for each client covering topics, alerts and executive briefings. Built API-first, and designed to grow from a single managed client into multi-tenant software.

NZ mediaIntelligence platformNext.js · Prisma

Status — in development

PressPrep — a scored review of a practice interview, with the coaching plan below
Fig. 3 Interview run, scored
Dispatch 02

PressPrep

Affordable AI media training for people who suddenly have to front a journalist. A learn, practice and review loop, with AI interviewer personas grounded in the New Zealand media environment. They respond over voice and webcam, then score the run and hand back coaching notes. Media training used to cost thousands a day.

AI trainingRealtimeMultimodal

Status — prototype

Beehive Mirror — the archive by year alongside the raw markdown of a release
Fig. 4 The archive
Dispatch 03

Beehive Mirror

A clean, structured archive of every press release on beehive.govt.nz, kept as markdown. Unglamorous, but genuinely useful. It turns the government's own communications into data you can search, analyse and build on. Most of my other ideas start here.

Open governmentNZ politicsData

Status — running quietly

Gently Told — personalised audio stories for growing up
Fig. 5 A story, start to finish
Dispatch 04

Gently Told

Personalised audio stories for young children, generated from a child's name, interests and family. Underneath sits a full audio pipeline: AI narration, music mixed properly, safety filtering, and a parental review step before anything reaches a child. The most technically involved thing I've built, and it runs end to end.

Generative audioSafetyPayments

Status — product

Kiwi Landlord Empire — three homes off the market and onto the balance sheet
Fig. 6 Civilian Scumbag, rising
Dispatch 05

Kiwi Landlord Empire

A satirical idle game about the New Zealand housing crisis, where you climb from Civilian Scumbag to Housing Minister by being as rotten a landlord as possible. A joke with a serious target, and in its own way the purest example of what communication is for: saying something, and making people feel it.

SatireBrowser game

Play it ↗

Status — live & public

MyRefix — comparing two fixed mortgage terms to find the break-even rate
Fig. 7 Assorted
Dispatch 06

The rest of it

MyRefix, a New Zealand mortgage calculator that compares two fixed terms and finds the rate where they break even, and a handful of other tools I made because I wanted them to exist. Not everything needs to be a product.

MyRefixMortgage calculatorEtc.

Status — assorted

Section 03

Still in the lab

Half-built, mid-thought, or still an argument with myself.

Experiment A

The Spin Detector

Paste in a statement; it flags the weasel words, the passive-voice dodges, and what is carefully not being said.

Experiment B

What Would the Minister Say?

Trained on the Beehive archive, it writes a plausible ministerial statement on any topic, in the house style.

Experiment C

Mood of the Motu

A sentiment map of the New Zealand news cycle, read like a weather forecast.

more of these than there is time