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AI engineer clones his South Jersey mom's voice and calls water ice stands across New Jersey over July 4th weekend to build "waterice.ai"

NJ-born engineer builds the first comprehensive water ice index in history: 767 stands across all 21 counties, 24,756 verified prices, and 3,327 flavors, using an AI voice agent cloned, with her full consent, from his mother Denise. Median small water ice: $3.63. Every call opens with the agent disclosing she is an AI. The index also settles what to call the stuff, almost.

SOUTH JERSEY, USA, July 4, 2026

What does a water ice cost these days, anyway? And is it water ice, or Italian ice?

Over Fourth of July weekend 2026, a warm South Jersey voice named Denise started calling water ice stands across New Jersey, from the Wildwood boardwalk to Bergen County, asking two questions: what flavors do you have, and what does a cup cost? Denise is an AI voice agent. Her voice is a clone of the creator's mother, Denise Cortland of South Jersey, made with her full consent, and every single call opens with her saying so. The phone calls are the finishing pass on something bigger: an AI vision pipeline that read 50,986 photographs of New Jersey menu boards to build waterice.ai, the first comprehensive price and flavor index of the Garden State's signature frozen dessert.

"I grew up on water ice, and I've spent 14 years in London where nobody has any idea what it is," said Matt Cortland, the AI engineer behind the project. "So I cloned the most South Jersey voice I know, my mom's, with her blessing. She opens every call by saying she's an AI, because my mom has been telling people the truth her whole life and her clone wasn't going to start lying now."

What the data shows

The median small water ice in New Jersey costs $3.63. The cheapest verified small in the state is $1.50 at Kohr Soft Ice Cream in Little Egg Harbor Township. The most expensive is $8.00 at Ice Cream on Grand in Englewood, a 5.3x spread within one small state.

Water ice is still the best deal in frozen dessert. Across 24,756 verified prices, the median water ice costs $4.75, against $5.55 for gelati (the South Jersey specialty that layers water ice with soft ice cream), $5.74 for ice cream, and $6.95 for gelato. The index also found that 263 New Jersey stands serve gelati, the first count of its kind.

The state has at least 3,327 distinct water ice flavors and 8,516 ice cream flavors. The single deepest flavor bench in New Jersey belongs to Humpty Junior's in Columbia, with 148 distinct water ice flavors observed.

The index also produced a data-quality finding with teeth: before the project separated products by the menu heading they appear under, blended price data overstated the price of water ice by roughly 28 percent, because ice cream prices kept leaking into the average. Every price on waterice.ai is now typed to the product it belongs to and linked to the photograph or phone call it came from.

No government agency tracks the price of water ice. The federal CPI basket prices ice cream; it has never priced a wooder ice. waterice.ai is the first public dataset on what New Jerseyans actually pay for their own dessert.

And the naming war is real. The index tracks the "Water Ice Equator," the line across New Jersey where "water ice" gives way to "Italian ice." The most honest summary came from the stand that speaks both: "Italian ice typically, but we use water ice as well, depending on the area that we are servicing," the owner of Chillin Out Ice Cream in Tuckerton told Denise. Even the chains are split against themselves: at a Rita's Italian Ice in Manalapan, the employee who answered called the product "water ice" while standing under a sign that says Italian Ice.

The reactions

Unlike most AI calling projects, Denise discloses she is an AI in her opening sentence, on every call. New Jersey answered exactly the way New Jersey would.

At TLC Polish Water Ice in Ocean City, the owner had holiday-weekend priorities: "Right now, I'm gonna have to call you back because I got a line."

Coney Waffle in Belmar answered the phone as "the world-famous Coney Waffle," then confirmed they serve no water ice at all.

At Barnacle Bill's Amusements in Seaside Heights, Denise first talked her way past an automated phone menu, then got the most New Jersey answer in the dataset: "Do you serve water ice? Uh, we don't."

At Rita's in Manalapan, Denise collected a complete price ladder, kids $4.50 to quart $9.95, plus seventeen flavors of the day, including mermaid, gummy bear, and juicy pear, three flavors no photograph had ever caught.

At another Rita's in Lawrenceville, the voicemail box was full and not accepting messages. It was July 4th weekend. Fair.

And at Torico Ice Cream in Jersey City, Denise spent a minute negotiating with an automated phone menu that was stuck in a loop, two machines talking past each other, and nobody got a price. She hung up politely.

How it was built

waterice.ai was built by one engineer with an AI toolchain: Claude Code (Anthropic) wrote and ran the data pipeline and read 4,077 menu-board photographs; ElevenLabs cloned the voice and runs the conversational agent; Twilio places the calls; Google Places seeded the map of 1,401 candidate locations, which vision analysis narrowed to 767 confirmed water ice stands. Every price and flavor on the site links back to its source photograph or call transcript. New Jersey's one-party consent law makes the state uniquely suited to recorded survey calls, another reason the index starts, and for now ends, at the state line.

The public can add or correct prices at waterice.ai/report, which keeps the index alive between calling rounds.

waterice.ai is a sister project to the Guinndex (guinndex.ai), Cortland's AI-called index of Guinness prices across Ireland, covered by The Journal, Tech.eu, and Cybernews in March 2026.

About Matt Cortland

Matt Cortland is a New Jersey-born, London-based AI engineer and founder of Prime Directive AI Ltd. He previously co-founded The Cauldron, an immersive cocktail bar group that served over one million guests. He builds AI agents that call things and count things, and he misses wooder ice terribly.

Press contact: Matt Cortland, [email protected]