It's Thursday! Or Friday Jr.

🌧️ Today's weather: Mostly cloudy then a chance of showers, with a high in the upper 70s.

🎂 Happy birthday to our member Jonathan Tanzer!

Today’s newsletter is 798 words — a 3-minute read.

A national Latino civic engagement group is turning to an AI app to help voters cut through an increasingly complicated election system — in English or Spanish.

Why it matters: Nearly 39 million Hispanics can vote in this year's midterms, and their political loyalties are increasingly fluid.

• Hispanics have added 5.25 million eligible voters since 2022, more than any other racial or ethnic group, according to Pew Research Center.
• About 1 in 7 Latino voters who backed Trump in 2024 now say they want Democrats to control Congress, according to a new NBC News/Telemundo poll.

How it works: Mi Familia en Acción this month launched Nubi, a bilingual AI-powered app that answers questions about voting, voter registration, citizenship and Know Your Rights information.

• Users can ask questions in English or Spanish about where and when to vote, early voting, mail ballots and registration.

Unlike a general-purpose chatbot, Mi Familia en Acción president and CEO Héctor Sánchez Barba tells Axios that Nubi doesn't search the open internet for answers.

• The organization feeds it information from sources it considers reliable, with human review and guardrails around what the AI can answer.
• If Nubi doesn't have an answer, Sánchez says, it is designed to say so and direct the user to a trusted source or partner rather than invent a response.

What they're saying: "People don't need to be a constitutional lawyer to find information about how they need to vote," says Sánchez, adding that the goal is to put reliable information in one place.

• He stressed that Nubi is nonpartisan and doesn't recommend candidates or causes.

Zoom out: Nubi arrives as Latino voters play an increasingly large — and less predictable — role in American elections.

• In Texas, recent polls have shown a collapse in GOP support among Latino voters.
• Pew projects Hispanics will account for 16% of eligible voters in 2026, nearly double their 9% share in 2006.

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We caught up this week with Angela Pan Wong, an artist and illustrator based in Austin.

• A Taiwanese American, she has a BFA in design from the University of Texas and an MA in learning, design and technology from Stanford.

Driving the news: Wong will appear at BookPeople on Sunday at 4pm to talk about "Too Much Tony," the new children's book — words by Jenny Wang, also a UT graduate — that she illustrated.

• Tony is always told he's too much — too curious, too messy, too loud. He learns through a friendship that might not be a bad thing.

How did your background inform the project?

"Children of color as protagonists are a minority in books being published today, and it was important for us to represent a child of our background in the story. It's not mentioned in text, but there's a mythological creature in Tony's imaginative world that's a sort of Asian unicorn — a qilin."

"Too much" of something can implicitly extend to how people are characterized by their race or background, right?

"Asian American women are sometimes labeled as too loud, too opinionated— or too shy, and the message we really want to convey is that can be a strength in certain contexts."

What's the audience for this book?

"Definitely anybody who maybe has not fit in in a particular place or situation, who's been called too loud, or too emotional or too shy."

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📖 The University of Texas has paused its school librarian certificate program. Demand for school librarians has increased, while certificate enrollment has declined because of what's seen as reluctance to join the field. (The Daily Texan)

🤖 Federal safety data shows Austin has logged 249 robotaxi crashes and at least 14 reported injuries since 2013. (KXAN)

🌮 Austin-based Torchy's Tacos is rolling out a turnaround plan after recent store closures. (Austin Business Journals 🔒)

The old standbys are old standbys for a reason.

The big picture: We ordered the kale butternut risotto ($25) from Asti recently and it was as tasty as it was gorgeous. (H/t to Axios friend Bill G. for hosting dinner.)

• Its vibrant colors, rice crisp cracker and smear of butternut sauce looked like something of a 1980s piece of pop art.
• It also was chewy, yummy and filling in just the right ways.

The bottom line: The Hyde Park stalwart is now more than 25 years old, but its food remains current — and worth a trip back.

Thanks to Astrid Galván and Bob Gee for editing this newsletter.

✈️ Asher is out.

👀 Nicole wants to take this new flight from Austin to Anchorage.