Wishstone: Negotiating Voice Agency Through a Tangible Generative Keepsake

Voice-cloning tools typically let an operator script what another person appears to say. Such control is ill-suited to a generative keepsake, which should create new, personal speech without letting the recipient dictate the contributor’s words. We present Wishstone, a promptless tangible voice keepsake in which a contributor authorizes a cloned voice and supplies personal memories, while a recipient can invoke a model-authored message by placing a stone. Wishstone implements this interaction through an anecdote-to-voice pipeline that prescreens generated text, synthesizes it in the contributor’s cloned voice, and encrypts it for local playback. In a preliminary formative evaluation with six recipients, participants reported that the messages felt personally grounded and that placement gave them control over when the voice was heard. They attributed influence to multiple actors but assigned most harmful-output responsibility to designers and AI services. These findings suggest that creative agency can be distributed across an interface while accountability may remain concentrated on those who design and provide its gen- erative system.