VAL is a friendly AI voice companion that helps you discover what really matters to you through a 15-minute conversation. Like a thoughtful friend who listens carefully and asks good questions, not a teacher, coach, or therapist, it walks you through your work, relationships, free time, and bigger-picture concerns to surface your top values and the trade-offs that shape your decisions. Then it helps you turn the answers into a Personal Constitution you can return to.
Click the widget, allow your microphone, and answer honestly. The conversation takes about fifteen minutes. Your conversation is stored, strictly for research to improve the tool.
VAL runs a structured values interview. Instead of asking you to pick from a list, it probes the trade-offs you actually make: where you spend time, what you protect, what you are willing to lose. The output is a draft Personal Constitution, a short document that names your operating values in your own words.
It is a voice agent on purpose. Speaking surfaces things that picking from a menu hides. You hesitate, you qualify, you talk yourself into and out of positions, and that is where the real values show up.
VAL is not a personality quiz, and it draws on real research rather than invented categories. The interview is grounded in Schwartz's Theory of Basic Human Values, a landmark framework that identifies 19 core values found across cultures and personalities. These are the fundamental motivations psychologists have shown to be close to universal in human experience.
Everyone prioritizes them differently, but everyone grapples with the same underlying tensions: independence or loyalty, adventure or safety, personal achievement or fairness to others. VAL surfaces where you actually land on those trade-offs. It uses plain, age-appropriate language, never judges your choices, and leaves you with a clear picture of which values matter most to you right now. Your values can shift over time, and that is completely normal.
The interview is also shaped by the deliberate stance at the heart of Technoselectives, drawn from Lindsay Ems's study of Amish technology adoption in Virtually Amish: the question is not what a tool can do for you, but what it will do to you, judged against values you have already named. The output, a short Personal Constitution, is what makes that judgment possible: your values made explicit, in your own words, so they can actually function as a filter when the next decision arrives.
VAL is the working edge of a larger idea I call Technoselectives: the case for adopting technology deliberately, on your own terms, rather than defaulting to whatever ships next. You cannot choose tech on your own terms until you know what those terms are. VAL is the front door to that, the values come first, the tools come after.
It is also a build-in-public experiment. It is live, it is imperfect, and the conversation about how to make it better matters more than getting it perfect before anyone sees it.
VAL is a prototype, not a substitute for professional guidance. Your conversation is stored strictly for research to improve the tool, and is not used for any other purpose. Built with ElevenLabs Agents.
PERISCOPE