Sonist

Overview

Mention-market trading software that listens to a live broadcast and buys the contract the moment a tracked word is said. Sonist pulls the mention markets from Kalshi and Polymarket onto one board — 53 approved events the day we checked it, 36 on Kalshi and 17 on Polymarket — each contract already carrying its keywords, its aliases and the count that settles it. Point a session at a stream URL, your microphone or your device audio and Sonist transcribes word by word; when a keyword clears its threshold it fires an immediate-or-cancel order on your own exchange account, under a contract cap and a maximum price in cents that you set before the session starts. The board re-marks over a websocket as the book moves, every detection and every skipped signal is logged with its reason, and one control flattens the position. Pro adds local speaker diarization, so a mention only counts when the voice that matters says it — the Fed governor rather than the anchor quoting him.

How it works

• The trade is a race, not a forecast. The market prices how likely a word is to be said; Sonist tries to buy YES in the gap between the word leaving the speaker's mouth and the book repricing. Its landing puts that at 238ms word-to-order — the vendor's own figure, measured by nobody else.
• The gap is only worth crossing if the fill is cheap. On a contract already quoted at 95¢ the gross edge is 5¢ before exchange fees, so the price ceiling — not the keyword list — is the setting that decides whether a session makes money, and it is the one thing you set yourself.
• The landing calls a qualifying fill below $1 “guaranteed profit”. It is not: the exchange settles on its own official transcript and its own rules, not on your audio feed, so a misheard word, a form that does not count, or a miscount on a contract needing 3+ or 10+ mentions is a total loss on that fill. Sonist's own risk page says as much — speech recognition, diarization and keyword detection can all be wrong, orders can go unfilled — which makes it the more honest of the two pages.
• The data layer checks out. Every quote on their board matched the exchange's own book the moment we compared them: 9 of 9 against Polymarket's CLOB and 15 of 16 against Kalshi's API, the miss being a null against a zero bid on an empty side. Keyword thresholds line up with the exchanges' own strike wording, so the mapping is derived from the market definitions rather than typed in.
• The trading engine does not check out, because nobody outside Sonist can reach it: it sits behind an account and, for the paid tiers, behind a waitlist. The walkthrough video shows a real session — chart, arming control, positions, panic-sell — but a video is not a track record, and no live P&L is published anywhere.
• Read the credential setup before funding anything. Kalshi is a proper API key you create on your own profile page and can revoke there. Polymarket has no equivalent: Sonist asks for the wallet private key itself, exported from Magic for email and Google accounts or from your own wallet app, plus the funder address. It stores keys encrypted, decrypts them in memory to sign, and verifies with a read-only balance check first — but a wallet key cannot be scoped or revoked the way an API key can, so the only real cap on that exposure is how little you keep in the wallet you connect.
• It is new. sonist.tech was registered Aug 21, 2026, has no Wayback history, and the X account has zero posts and zero followers; the legal pages carry a Jul 6, 2026 date, before the domain existed.

Supported markets

• Mention markets on Kalshi and Polymarket
• Earnings-call mention series — Broadcom, Dell, Snowflake, Lululemon, Zscaler, Ciena and others
• Political speech markets — Prime Minister's Questions, Fed governors, campaign announcements
• Podcasts, shows and broadcast segments