[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Martin (YC S23) - Using LLMs to Make a Be...
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Launch HN: Martin (YC S23) - Using LLMs to Make a Better Siri
Hey HN! Dawson here from Martin (https://www.trymartin.com). Martin
is a better Siri with an LLM brain and deeper integrations with
everyday apps. See our demo here (https://youtu.be/jiJdfrWurvk).
You can talk to Martin through voice in our iOS app. You can also
text it via SMS, WhatsApp, or email. Currently, Martin can manage
your calendar, set reminders, find information, send you daily
briefings, and have text conversations with your contacts on your
behalf (from its own phone number). I've been a Siri power user
for a long time, mainly because I've always liked using voice as an
interface. But, legacy voice assistants like Siri, Google
Assistant, and Alexa were never well integrated enough or reliable
enough to actually save time. Maybe 1 in 5 commands end up
executing as smoothly as you expected, but the most useful thing
they do is play a song or set an alarm. The advent of LLMs seemed
like a great opportunity to push the state of the art forward a
notch or two! Our goal is to do 2 things better: 1) Deeper
integrations with productivity-related apps you use every day, like
calendar, email, messages, whatsApp, and soon Google Docs, Slack,
and phone calls. 2) Better memory of each user based on their past
conversations and integrations, so Martin can start to anticipate
parameters in the user's commands (e.g. text the guy from yesterday
about the plans we made this morning) A great way that our early
users use Martin is having morning syncs and evening debriefs with
the software. At the start/end of each day, they'll have a 5-10
minute sync about their TODOs for the next day, and Martin will
brief them on upcoming tasks and news they're typically interested
in. Something else Martin does which is unlike other voice
assistants is it can have full text conversations with your
contacts on your behalf from its own phone number. For example, you
can tell it to plan a lunch with a friend, and it can text back and
forth with that friend to figure out a time and place. After the
text conversation between your friend and Martin is over, Martin
reports back to you via a notification and a text. You can also
monitor all of its messages with your contacts in the app. We
started building Martin exactly 1 year ago, during our YC batch.
It's definitely a hard product to "complete" because of the many
unsolved technical challenges, but we're making progress step by
step. First was the voice interface, which Siri still hasn't gotten
right after more than a decade. We have 2 modes: push-to-talk and
handsfree. Handsfree is great for obvious reasons. We've gotten our
latency down to only a couple seconds max for most commands, and
we've tuned our own voice activity detection model to minimize the
chance of Martin cutting you off (a common problem with voiceGPTs).
But, even then, Martin may still cut you off if you pause for 3-5
seconds in the middle of a thought, so we made a push-to-talk mode.
For those cases where you want to describe something in detail or
just brain-dump to Martin, you might need 20-30 seconds to finish
speaking. So just hold down, speak, and release when you're done--
like a walkie talkie. We've also had to tackle a very long tail of
integrations, and we want to do each one well. For example, when we
launched Google calendar, we wanted to make sure you could add a
Google Meet link, invite your contacts to the events, and access
secondary calendars. And, you should be able to say things like
"set reminders leading up to the event" or "text Eric the details
of this event." So, we pretty much release one new major
integration every month. Finally, there's the problem of
personalization / LLM memory, which is still very unsolved. From
each conversation that a user has with their Martin, we try to
infer what the user is busy with, worried about, or looking forward
to, so in their next "morning sync" or "evening debrief", Martin
can proactively suggest to-dos or goals/topics to discuss with the
user. Right now, we use a few different LLMs and many chain-of-
thought steps to extract clues from each conversation and have
Martin "reflect" periodically to build its memory. But, with all
that said we still have a lot of work to do here, and this is just
a start! You can try Martin by going to our website
(https://www.trymartin.com) and starting a 7 day free trial. Once
you start your trial, you'll get an access code emailed to you
along with the download link for our iOS app. After you enter your
access code into the app, you can integrate your calendar,
contacts, etc. If you find Martin useful after the trial, we charge
our early users (who are generally productivity gurus and prosumers
with multiple AI subscriptions) a $30/month subscription. We can't
wait to hear your thoughts. Any cool experiences with Siri, things
you wish a voice assistant could do, or ideas about LLM memory,
tool calling, etc. - I'd love to discuss any of these topics with
you!
Author : darweenist
Score : 95 points
Date : 2024-07-31 14:24 UTC (8 hours ago)
| edreichua wrote:
| Very cool! Congrats on the launch. Is Martin able to respond to
| someone if they text back? Also what are some of the most
| commonly used integrations?
| darweenist wrote:
| Yes! If you have your Martin send a text to a contact, he'll
| respond to the contact automatically when they text back. You
| can track these replies in the app. Our most commonly used
| integrations are probably reminders and calendar - a lot of
| users like to sync with Martin in the morning and tell it
| everything on their schedule today, so they can be reminded
| throughout the day!
| mritchie712 wrote:
| This looks really well done and I appreciate the real, live demo
| instead of some over produced bullshit.
|
| Nice job!
| darweenist wrote:
| Thanks!
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I honestly don't understand why tech giants aren't doing this
| stuff.
| darweenist wrote:
| Same! We've all been waiting for an upgrade from Apple/Google
| for the last 10 years.
| p1esk wrote:
| Apple plans to update Siri to use OpenAI models in iOS 18.
|
| Not sure how it will affect this startup.
| cube2222 wrote:
| They're planning to update it to use on-device models,
| their "private compute" models, and optionally for certain
| prompts (with explicit user approval) OpenAI models.
|
| This is not directly in contradiction to what you said, but
| I feel like there's a lot of confusion around this.
| Gys wrote:
| You missed it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41116563
| cube2222 wrote:
| Apple has announced basically this on WWDC two months ago
| (Apple Intelligence), with a multi-tier architecture (on-
| device, private Apple compute, 3rd party models), a ton of
| integrations, and a focus on privacy.
|
| My main problem with startups around this is that it's just a
| big ask to get access to all my data and store it in their
| cloud.
| talldayo wrote:
| > Apple has announced basically this on WWDC two months ago
|
| ...after almost 10 years of internal stagnation and killing
| Siri's other upgrade projects:
| https://www.macrumors.com/2023/04/27/report-details-
| turmoil-...
|
| It's just baffling. Same goes for Microsoft and how utterly
| unusable Cortana is, these features should be more than
| afterthought integrations that limp along because they're too
| cheap to get rid of. The slow "evolution" of voice assistants
| is pretty much ensuring that nobody wants to use them, at
| least among the people I know that own smartphones. Something
| tells me that AI won't be the selling point Apple thinks it
| is, especially when anyone with a web browser can use ChatGPT
| for free.
| cube2222 wrote:
| Sure, they're taking their time.
|
| I've read through Apple's Intelligence architecture and I
| liked what I saw (context graph on device; how the
| integrations work; if doing remote inference only sending
| the relevant parts; the architecture of private compute).
|
| I haven't upgraded my phone in a while, and this will be
| the final push for me to get their next phone, personally,
| and I've been using ChatGPT and now Claude from the moment
| they got to a sensible level.
|
| That all of them are taking their sweet time with this
| makes me think it was just hard to get something
| production-ready out that will work for 99% of the
| population well.
| talldayo wrote:
| > and this will be the final push for me to get their
| next phone, personally
|
| So let me get this straight. You want AI features, but
| not the ChatGPT 4o functionality you can go use for free
| right now. You intend to upgrade to one of the Pro phones
| (the only ones guaranteed to get local AI functionality)
| for subpar AI functionality and less freedom to select an
| LLM that works for you?
|
| I don't get it. Since WWDC I've heard so much
| contradiction around what people want from Apple AI.
| Maybe I'm misinformed, but I think it's absolute nonsense
| that someone would trust OpenAI only when Apple is the
| middleman. I certainly know the majority of smartphone
| customers couldn't care less.
| cube2222 wrote:
| I think you missed the part that ChatGPT is completely
| optional in Apple's architecture. You have to explicitly
| allow ChatGPT per-prompt if you want to use it. The
| primary models are on-device and their "private compute".
|
| Importantly, I have a fair bit of trust towards OpenAI,
| but I'm not willing to share the details of half my
| digital life with them.
|
| After reading Apple's Intelligence architecture, I feel
| fairly comfortable with having it use the data from all
| my various apps for context.
| talldayo wrote:
| > After reading Apple's Intelligence architecture, I feel
| fairly comfortable with having it use the data from all
| my various apps for context.
|
| I would take those whitepapers with a grain of salt if I
| were you. Apple's documentation has been known for
| redacting certain... details, per the request of the US
| government. Plus, it's not like you or I can go audit the
| tech (or even the code) and confirm it's the same as in
| the documentation.
|
| Then again, I trust OpenAI and Apple both as far as I can
| throw them. Maybe it _is_ me being overly discriminate
| about what I consider secure and not.
| threeseed wrote:
| > I don't get it
|
| That's very obvious from your comment.
|
| Apple Intelligence is an on-device LLM backed by a
| private Apple hosted LLM. So it has access to your
| private data and is designed to provide capabilities that
| can leverage it e.g. it will have knowledge of all your
| personal interactions across multiple apps. It is
| fundamentally a _personal_ experience.
|
| It is completely different from ChatGPT which is a single
| LLM that is used to provide a _public_ experience. And
| nothing is stopping you from using Claude, Mistral or any
| other LLMs through their existing apps.
| talldayo wrote:
| > And nothing is stopping you from using Claude, Mistral
| or any other LLMs through their existing apps.
|
| That's what I'm talking about, really. Why would you buy
| a new iPhone to get functionality you can receive from
| the App Store?
|
| I can see two reasons. You're either one of the evergreen
| sycophants that buys into Apple's security theater, or
| you're an obsessive Apple-maniac that will use any of
| their products no matter how bad they are. Those are two
| miniscule audiences, in the market of current and future
| iPhone owners. You would have to show me market research
| to convince me that even 5% of iPhone owners fall into
| either category.
|
| So I'll ask again: does anyone _really_ think an inferior
| local AI with access to your contacts list is going to
| drive upgrades? Mind you, in the EU Apple isn 't even
| shipping these features because they have to mysteriously
| and arbitrarily prevent developers from offering
| competing AI integrations.
| threeseed wrote:
| You really aren't getting it.
|
| Apple's LLM is not a competitor for ChatGPT, Claude,
| Mistral etc.
|
| It is an on-device model that has access to _all_ of your
| private data e.g. health, contacts, mail, photos,
| messages etc. Something that no other LLM will ever get
| access to. Which means you can ask highly contextualised
| questions like "show me the photos I took on my last
| holiday". Again something no other LLM can do.
|
| And it may not drive upgrades on its own but people asked
| for a better Siri and Apple unquestionably delivered on
| it.
| webappguy wrote:
| Please. Don't mention apple and AI in the same sentance.
| Siri is worse than zero, it is utterly absolutely
| useless. And to partner with OpenAI. They have to get
| their S** in order here and fast, but if I put out a
| product like Siri I would be INSANELY embarrassed. If I
| was a trillion-dollar company and did, I would resign in
| discrace.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| They move slow. Smaller folks can move fast. "Sherlocked"
| potential is high, but on the bright side, could move the
| needle on open source capabilities in this space (if they can
| do, someone else can do). A rising tide lifts all boats. And it
| is great PR regardless for the folks building from a portfolio
| perspective if they have to pivot or move on to other
| endeavors.
| cellis wrote:
| Because if TECH GIANT gets this sort of thing wrong
| (CCPA,GDPR,ePR, anti-trust, <add acronym here>) there is
| <fine_bigger_than_your_series_C> waiting for them.
| apwell23 wrote:
| Apple wants their shit to be tight. They cannot release stuff
| that hallucinates.
|
| I am guessing its against their philosophy to release product
| that only works sometimes from the get go. Thats why they have
| been so demure about whole AI stuff.
| atonse wrote:
| I do think in general, Apple is great at continuous
| improvement.
|
| But have you used Siri?
|
| "Only works sometimes", yes if all you ever ask is "what time
| is it", what's the weather, and maybe 5-6 other canned
| prompts.
|
| Half the time it doesn't even understand or catch what's
| being said. (Mainly talking about the HomePod, it generally
| works fine on an iPhone)
|
| Siri is a great example of Apple being perfectly fine letting
| a product languish so what might've been great 10 years ago
| is a punchline now.
| vendiddy wrote:
| I'm equally surprised.
|
| It has been a few years and my Android assistant is still dumb.
| I would have expected the iOS/Android assistants to be much
| better by now.
| aggarwalachal wrote:
| Congrats on the launch.
|
| Please update the video to bleep out "Siri"
| yewenjie wrote:
| This is something I have been so desperately wanting that I
| thought I would build a hacky version for myself.
|
| - How did you solve the long-term memory problem? What kind of
| issues are you facing with scaling the number of tools?
|
| - I like the idea but there's one crucial thing missing for me. I
| will happily pay for your app if it lets me bring my own API
| keys/ endpoints for models that I can host, so that I know my
| data is private and secure.
| darweenist wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback!
|
| - Right now, we use a combination of RAG and chain of thought
| for storing memories. At different time intervals, we'll create
| memories at different levels of granularity. For example, at
| the end of every conversation, we'll embed some vectors based
| on specific commands from the user. At the end of each day,
| we'll have the LLM reflect on key questions related to a user's
| routine. And every few days, it'll reflect on the user's
| short/long term goals. This has worked to some degree, but
| we're still in the very early stages of figuring out how to do
| long-term memory for an assistant.
|
| - Scaling the number of tools is definitely a struggle since we
| want to make our integrations as thorough as we can. It takes
| time, so we just try to keep growing the list consistently. We
| have an internal goal of adding at least one new major
| integration every month.
|
| - Love the idea of bringing your own API keys/endpoints. We've
| gotten this feedback before, so we'll seriously consider it in
| our next few sprints!
| M4v3R wrote:
| +1 for bringing your own LLM
| darweenist wrote:
| Noted!
| anupam01 wrote:
| what model are you using?
| darweenist wrote:
| We're using GPT and Claude for different parts of the software!
| tiahura wrote:
| Will definitely try. Been tinkering with similar.
|
| Want big $$$? Support exchange 365 via MS Graph API or whatever
| today's preferred api is.
| darweenist wrote:
| Great to hear you've been tinkering with similar ideas! Would
| love to try out what you've built too.
|
| Exchange is on our list! Started the Microsoft compliance
| process a couple months ago - expecting to get support for at
| least outlook or word rolled out this year.
| yewenjie wrote:
| What are the existing similar products?
| written-beyond wrote:
| Looks great guys! I'm working specifically on improving voice
| interfaces too. Maybe I can join you guys to help you out!
|
| Also I feel you, about running into all of the challenges your
| facing with LLMs. We've run into quiet a few road blocks, but
| your comments summarises it the best. Just keep working on it
| step by step.
| darweenist wrote:
| Thanks! What have been the main LLM/voice challenges you've
| faced? We're always down to trade notes if helpful! Feel free
| to email me anytime at dawson@trymartin.com.
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| $30 a month seems steep for an early stage product. I could get a
| few million tokens for that price :/
| smt88 wrote:
| > * Something else Martin does which is unlike other voice
| assistants is it can have full text conversations with your
| contacts on your behalf from its own phone number. For example,
| you can tell it to plan a lunch with a friend, and it can text
| back and forth with that friend to figure out a time and place.*
|
| If the contact thought they were talking to me, it would be
| fucking dystopian. I would immediately break contact with someone
| who gaslighted me with AI.
|
| Please make some sort of pledge or guarantee that your company
| will never impersonate a human and that it will always identify
| itself as a machine when communicating with others.
| darweenist wrote:
| I totally agree! It would be extremely awkward. Just so that
| there's never any confusion with the contact, we make sure
| Martin always starts his texts with "[name of owner]'s Martin
| here."
| thriftwy wrote:
| Dorogoi Martin Alekseevich![1]
|
| 1. https://languagehat.com/sorokins-norma/
| scottydelta wrote:
| How do you make yourself future proof from Apple? Apple can just
| making Siri smarter and add integrations with tons of other
| softwares, apps, and hardwares?
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Age old question with no good answer, as cribbing from the
| community is how apple brainstorms their new products.
|
| https://ios.gadgethacks.com/how-to/60-ios-features-apple-sto...
| chaostheory wrote:
| Good point.
|
| Apple's strength and weakness is that there is only one Apple
| way to do things for ease of use and for it to "just work".
| However, not everyone fits into their cookie cutter design
| regardless of how good it is. Customization and options
| beyond what Apple does tends to be the way to go.
| threeseed wrote:
| The idea that the community invented a control panel,
| notifications, coloured icons, the ability to turn cellular,
| delete previous calls etc is pretty laughable.
| fragmede wrote:
| aka getting Sherlocked
| spiderice wrote:
| Apple has almost certainly been working on LLM Siri since
| before this company existed. Not sure that counts as
| Sherlocking.
| dom96 wrote:
| Isn't this the first thing YC would ask? How did this get
| funded by YC?
| 0x62 wrote:
| I just gave Martin a go. What I'm looking for is an AI PA that
| can:
|
| - do some research on a given company/individual/website and give
| me a summary.
|
| - preferably also identify a contact email.
|
| - handle selecting a good time for meetings according to my
| availability and preferences.
|
| - handle the communication with the other party.
|
| - let me know when it is arranged, or if it's given up.
|
| I signed up and gave it a UK phone number, and got a UK number
| back for texting Martin. I'm not sure why it has to be SMS when
| it could be an in-app chat. I was expecting to get a confirmation
| SMS or similar, but it just accepted it straight away. When I
| texted the number I was given (several times), it was delivered
| but there was no reply.
|
| Martin sent me an email welcoming me. I replied asking it to set
| up a meeting for early next week with another email address.
| Martin replied saying it is unable to email people on my behalf,
| and suggested I set it up myself.
|
| > Unfortunately, I am currently unable to send emails to other
| people on your behalf. However, you can easily send an email to
| ** to schedule the meeting for early next week in the afternoon.
|
| I reminded Martin that there is an example on the website
| homepage of doing just that, and it replied saying it can indeed
| schedule meetings, and asked for the details again. I replied
| with the same details, and it confirmed the meeting was set up.
|
| I checked my other email, and there was no message setting
| anything up. I told Martin that the other party needs to know
| about the email, and it replied with:
|
| > Understood. I'll make sure to inform ** about the meeting
| details.
|
| Still nothing received. Furthermore, I checked the app and I
| haven't even connected my calendar, so I'm surprised it didn't
| warn me or prompt me to do this when I asked for a meeting.
|
| I gave up with that and decided to try something else. I
| forwarded Martin an email thread from a lead, which included a
| lot of back story on their organization, offering, and some areas
| that they think we could potentially collaborate on. I asked
| Martin to find out more about the company, and evaluate the
| options for collaboration.
|
| This lead is in the AI space, with their primary product being a
| document digitisation solution to help surface and discover
| business documents.
|
| Martin replied describing it as a "nearbound revenue platform to
| streamline revenue operations", with a key feature being
| "Automated lead scoring and distribution to prioritize high
| potential leads". As far as evaluating the collaboration
| opportunities, it instead gave me a list of collaboration
| features within the platform, none of which exist.
|
| At the end, it linked to a blog post to their recent funding
| round. Except, the blog post was from a completely unrelated
| company with a similar name. Bear in mind that the originally
| forwarded email was from their business email account, and the
| body contained multiple links and references to their website.
|
| I decided to try one more test, and asked it to do some research
| on my own business website and let me know what it finds out.
| It's been 20 minutes, and I haven't had a reply. I checked the
| app to see if there was any indication it's working on something
| for me, but nothing their either.
|
| I love the idea of Martin, but I'll be canceling my trial - it
| just doesn't seem anywhere near ready yet - especially given I
| have to trust it to communicate on my behalf.
| darweenist wrote:
| Thank you for all the feedback! Just wanted to hop on and
| address a few things.
|
| - I totally resonate with your criteria for an AI PA - this is
| very much what we're working towards with our email
| integration. We had been focused on voice for a while, but
| recently started tackling all the email use cases. Really want
| to get these right for you!
|
| - Sorry for the poor onboarding job - we should make it more
| clear that you have to sync your calendar before we send you an
| email inviting you to send and forward scheduling items to
| Martin.
|
| - For sending emails to contacts, this is one of our upcoming
| integrations that we've been building for a while - but just
| not ready yet! We want to make it able to send/reply to emails
| and fully act on threads that you attach it to. This means
| issuing you a unique email address for "your Martin" and
| managing it's behavior on threads and memory of other contacts.
| It's a harder problem than we first anticipated, so we're
| working through it steadily! It should be ready in the next
| month or so. For now, the communications feature is just
| limited to texting contacts on your behalf.
|
| - For "deep searches", it definitely isn't the greatest at
| digging into a topic or generating a thorough briefing for you
| right now. We're not sure how deep we'll go into this use case
| in the future, but we do plan on integrating with more
| specialized functions, like LinkedIn, Twitter, Maps, etc. which
| should make this a lot better.
|
| Sorry again for the poor onboarding experience. I think we also
| got an email from you, so will reply there as well to ask for
| more feedback!
| frankdenbow wrote:
| Big fan of Martin personally. One of the few startups I enjoyed
| and then invested in. Mostly use it for creative brainstorming
| and talking through ideas. On a morning walk I can cycle through
| ideas and when I get back to my laptop I have a bunch of research
| done. Team has been cranking for a while so looking forward to
| the updates.
| yrcyrc wrote:
| would love this, especially being in the EU where Apple
| Intelligence fearures might not be released or would need one of
| the latest devices, but 30$ a month is a big no no for me, i'd
| rather do my own implementation for a fraction of the price!
| 1080pieces wrote:
| Sounds, will give it a try!
| asun19 wrote:
| This looks awesome, so excited to try out the product!! Such a
| unique spin on the voice AI agents out there.
| uoaei wrote:
| unique? hardly. honestly the greentext name raises the
| likelihood significantly that this is mere astroturfing. i know
| we should allow benefit of the doubt but it seems hard to
| believe anyone involved enough in this discussion to post
| comments is naive enough not to know the possibilities within
| the LLM space today.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| The YC folks must like you as founders because your business is
| 100% going to get eaten and you're going to be lucky to get aqui-
| hired. Get ready to pivot.
| nailer wrote:
| Exactly. _Apple_ is using LLMs to make a better Siri. This is
| already in the next iOS update.
| jmagnuss wrote:
| I want this, but very concerned about the security and privacy -
| you're talking about getting my most personal of personals
| (email, calendar, messages, phone calls). This could be a
| nightmare of privacy or security breaches. That's why I'm likely
| waiting for Apple's version within their corporate security and
| privacy commitments (and they already have my data). I don't see
| anything on the website about SOC2, or privacy commitments beyond
| a boilerplate policy?
| darweenist wrote:
| Thanks for leaving the comment! We totally understand your
| concerns, and you're not alone! We ourselves are very privacy
| sensitive, and never liked the idea of hardware devices always
| listening to us. And, as you said, our integrations are dealing
| with the most personal of personal information.
|
| We recently got our CASA Tier-2 compliance done (Cloud
| Application Security Assessment). We've also gone through
| Google's OAuth compliance process for every new integration we
| add that's related to Google. These assessments scan our app
| and make sure that our software meets pretty stringent
| standards when it comes to data security and encryption, and
| that we're not using the data for anything other than the
| specific features we promise (i.e. not sharing or selling to
| advertisers, etc.). You can read more about CASA here
| (https://appdefensealliance.dev/casa). We haven't gone through
| SOC2 yet, but planning on soon once we have a few more
| integrations.
| lulzury wrote:
| This really doesn't say much though. What specific measures
| are in place to ensure user privacy and data protection?
|
| Does personal information get sent to OpenAI or Claude as
| part of the functionality? Can users request deletion of
| their data, and if so, what is the process? Are there
| specific protocols in place to ensure security? (i.e. Do you
| use encryption at rest?).
| talldayo wrote:
| > What specific measures are in place to ensure user
| privacy and data protection?
|
| Unless you intend to personally audit their code, I'd argue
| it couldn't possibly matter. Even businesses like Apple
| publish all kinds of documentation that belies the reality
| of their infrastructure. The iMessage Security Overview
| doesn't mention the NSA's retention period for encrypted
| communique; the push notification documentation doesn't
| tell you about the government middleman processing each
| alert.
|
| You either trust people blindly, or you validate them
| personally. Getting a pinkie-promise about privacy from the
| CEO is worth absolutely nothing in real-world security
| terms.
| pulvinar wrote:
| Besides the obvious privacy concerns, I'm worried about dangers
| from it being invoked by someone else within voice range. I've
| always thought that's why the current Siri has limited abilities.
|
| I'm sure it won't be long before we see apps that listen, record
| any "Hey Siri" they hear, and then synthesize that voice to give
| your phone commands to "tell me my passwords", or more insidious
| and difficult-to-detect commands.
|
| It seems Apple's new version will be facing this problem too.
| ryankrage77 wrote:
| I already have one or two false positives a day where Siri will
| mistakenly trigger and search for something random on the
| internet (I have an iPhone, apple watch and homepods, so I
| guess it's more likely to happen with more devices listening).
| salamo wrote:
| I personally prefer a UI most of the time. It's higher fidelity
| and cuts through the inherent ambiguity of language.
|
| The exception for me would be situations where I can't use my
| hands, like driving. I don't want to have to look at a screen. If
| a voice agent could replicate the functionality of CarPlay, that
| would be really useful.
| janalsncm wrote:
| On your YC page it lists three founders: Dawson, Harsh and Arjun.
| But Dawson is the only one listed pretty much everywhere else
| online. Does this mean the other two founders have quit, and if
| so I worry about sinking $30 into something which may not exist
| very soon.
| adamtaylor_13 wrote:
| Not trying to be rude, but... how is this a business? Apple is
| uniquely poised to deliver a solution here. I don't see how a
| business could compete with that.
|
| They even announced it during the WWDC this year.
|
| Again, I'm a founder myself. Not trying to poopoo on this. I'm
| just curious how this idea has legs with all the might of Apple
| looking poised to crush this.
| ianbicking wrote:
| On your homepage you have the call to action that goes to a
| Stripe page, but no real indication that it's an iOS-only
| application. If I was an excited Android user and went through
| the payment process only to find out it doesn't have an Android
| app I'd be very annoyed.
|
| Anyway, a few thoughts...
|
| 1. I find the event planning stuff to be kind of stale. Like
| maybe it will be cool this time, but so far it's part of every
| demo and concept around AI assistants and it's never ACTUALLY
| been cool. I wish this was trying to be cool in a new way.
|
| 2. The turn-taking for voice input looks kind of awkward. I get
| why it has to be that way, and there's not really a better
| solution, but... well, maybe it would be possible to use visual
| output and voice input, or generally make them complement each
| other. Many details are better to show visually and can be
| tedious to listen to.
|
| 3. I like the patient and attentive secretary model more than the
| turn-taking chat. The confirmation turn-taking is a trust
| exercise (did the AI _really_ hear and understand what I said?)
| but I think there's other ways to handle that trust. Like being
| more trustworthy (modern non-streaming speech recognition works
| really well!), making things easy to undo, or detecting unlikely
| commands and require verification.
|
| 4. For example, when reviewing a to-do list, I'd rather it show
| the list and I can just say "yeah, I finished item 1 and 2, and I
| was able to pick up milk but there's still some other groceries I
| need to get for tonight" and have it complete and revise entries
| based on that.
|
| 5. Generally to-do and task management is 10x more interesting to
| me than calendaring. But you should have a theory, not just be a
| layer over something else. I should be able to break down tasks,
| complete subtasks, identify partial completion and have it
| identify the remaining portions, get suggestions on breakdown,
| get advice on which tasks to complete when, etc.
|
| 6. Another interesting thing would be a kind of personal
| database. I would love to be able to unload a lot of information
| from my head and know that it will be put someplace where it can
| be meaningfully retrieved, combined with other data, etc. Like if
| I have certain bill payments or house maintenance I want to
| remember or something, I don't want to turn that into calendar
| items. Lots of them aren't even fully articulated, or the
| structure will emerge as more information becomes available. But
| I want to get started before I have carefully defined the task,
| and an AI assistant could do that.
| darweenist wrote:
| I like the idea of a more intricate theory for task management.
| We also don't want to just wrap your calendar. Right now, you
| can dump a bunch of upcoming tasks to Martin through voice,
| text, or via a forwarded email. It'll set them as reminders and
| then bring them up in future syncs to check on progress. It's
| just a start though, we can definitely make it more complete -
| i.e. "break down tasks, complete subtasks, identify partial
| completion and have it identify the remaining portions, get
| suggestions on breakdown, get advice on which tasks to complete
| when."
|
| We'll be experimenting a lot and releasing updates to Martin's
| home screen layout and feed soon! There's a good chance this
| will come with changes in how we do task management altogether.
|
| Also totally hear you on the personal database idea. We've been
| toying with similar ideas for a while. Many users already do
| this with Martin, basically brain dump in a long voice session,
| and it'll suggest reminders/calendar events for you. We're
| still figuring out how to display this personal DB info to the
| user in a UI though, so would love to hear your suggestions.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| I don't know how these get funded by YC. I have followed YC from
| the beginning and it seems it funds so many of these startups on
| the "current thing" these days.
|
| Maybe the founders they are funding are not diverse enough. Is
| there too much tracking on which universities they went to? So
| the same set is applying and getting funded?
| falloon wrote:
| What are you spending per user on API costs? 7 days free trial
| seems quite generous.
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