Vedal held an impromptu Q&A in #neurotic-neurons channel. Here is the summary.
Questions are edited for simplicity.
#Vedal Q&A Summary - 30.01.2024
void ledge
Long break and return
Q: Why did you decide on such a long break?
A: I didn't. I took an actual break, started working again and just waiting for the fruits of my labour
Q: Do you plan on streaming within a couple weeks?
A: if I finish cooking within a couple weeks, depends how it goes really
Q: How's your progress on the cooking? 50%? 30%
A: < [less than that]. surely I wouldn't stream an undercooked meal 
Q: Have you decided on a date for the return?
A: no it depends when I have something to show for it
Q: Have you considered occasionally throwing on some chill streams during the hiatus or is that not possible?
A: yes and its possible but I don't think I should
Q: What upgrades or specific stuff are you currently working on at the moment?
A: Today I was working on improving her hearing for a couple reasons:
- better accuracy at word transcription
- better latency (its actually one of the slower things in the pipeline rn)
- not being distracted by background noise
you could call it v3 hearing i suppose, haven't finished yet though, the closer I get to cutting edge the trickier things get. ideally one day I want multimodal hearing so she can understand sounds/music, and intonation
Q: Are you working on something other than this?
screenshot of a task tracker, shows 20 tasks in progress wouldn't expect too many of these to be done soon though
Q: Will the first stream back be a dev stream?
A: actually probably not but no guarantees
Q: When you do stream, who's gonna appear first - Neuro or Evil?
A: i expect neuro
Q: Will you put out a schedule once you’ve finished your cooking or announce a date then put a schedule out after that?
A: the latter I think
General questions
Q: Are Neuro and Evil okay?
A: haven't asked, they're sleeping
Q: Have you figured out whats up with her filter?
A: its funnier if i dont though
Q: A while back you said you wanted to redo like 50% of Neuro's code. Did you ever end up doing that?
A: most of it has been redone since, there are still some difficult parts though
Q: How much does it cost to run Neuro per month?
A: a lot, more than 1000. rn she doesn't cost much herself since she's offline, but rnd [research and development] still exists
Updates
Q: Any updates on Neuro's new outfit?
A: thats gonna be a while, evil model first I would expect
Q: Any updates towards neuros voice?
A: SOTA [state-of-the-art] TTS is, as you might expect, hard
Q: Any plans on updating Neuro’s singing voice?
A: it will happen at some point
Q: Have you done anything with Geoguesser or Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes?
A: no
Q: What’s the progress on Slay the Spire?
A: been working on other things mostly, but commentary is better
Future content
Q: Are you practicing singing with Neuro? What song, what genre?
A: unfortunately I did. you'll find out
Q: Do you have any collabs planned or on queue?
A: i do
Q: Will you react to fanarts and videos for Neuros on stream in the future?
A: maybe!
Q: Have you considered making it so Neuro can comment on YouTube videos, like clips or animations of her and things?
A: going to guess that youtube doesnt like bot comments
Q: Any plans on how the Shrek stream would work? Are you gonna watch it with her?
A: she watches shrek. no
Q: If Neuro can cry or laugh more like real person, I think it would be fantastic.
A: multimodal llms 
[..] when they can output speech directly without using TTS - i will be very happy.
Q: How will you track when they avoid the filter?
A: train nn [neural network] to detect bad outputs directly from the embeddings it generates I would guess
Q: Neuro roast viewers singing stream when?
A: When multimodal llms are more normalised i guess
Publicity
Q: Are you doing anything for 500k Twitch subs milestone or are you waiting for one million?
A: have I ever celebrated a milestone
Q: Do you have any plans to do some tweets or announcements about The Streamer Award?
A: I wouldn't hold out hope lmao
Q: If you win the Streamer Award will you say your catch phrase "vedal out" this time?
A: big if
Merch and donations
Q: Are you going to sell more Neuro fumos?
A: maybe an outfit someday?
Q: Turtle Makeship plush is in plans?
A: yeah but low priority for me rn
Q: Do you have any plans on streamlabs tips page, like connecting it to TTS?
A: its on the list yeah but kinda low priority since bits exist
Q: Can you set up another donation system, like Wise?
A: idk how to do that without doxxing myself
Q: Has any companies came up and offered you sponsorships? And do you consider taking any?
A: yes, i dont take many. in like may or something i took one [sponsored whatchalong]
Other questions
Q: Will you bring up game jam results soon? or like after the first stream you’re back or something?
A: probably a stream
Q: If say, hypothetically speaking, the OpenAI foundation imploded on itself from mismanagement and/or government regulating it into oblivion would Neuro still be okay in its absence?
A: [quote from the day OpenAI had an internal protest] "its a good day to not have an ai based on chatgpt"
Q: How's Baldur's Gate?
A: dont remember shows screenshot of Steam stats, last played: January 22
Q: Did you fix your sleep schedule?
A: shows screenshot, 6 AM