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I installed it. Its cool. However, it competes with first class features that are provided by the platform you are running on. Any successful voice platform will also have these features you will need to compete against.

Other commenters are right - your differentiators are small and Amazon could implement them with their vast resources in a sprint or two. It's just a guess, but Alexa is probably much larger when it comes to people and money backing it.

You are going to be competing with any platform you run on. It's like you are using Alexa's voice recognition component, but then rebuilding the experience on top of it. Kinda weird.

Most skills extend or compliment the platform. Now I'll have to make sure I use Lifebot instead of Alexa to get a certain feature - its a bad CX if you ask me.

How are you making money? I highly doubt Amazon is paying you to compete with them on core platform functionality.

Also - you have to you give your phone number for the SMS to work. If you have Alexa and enabled communications - it would even be easy for Amazon to implement "Alexa, send that story to Bob" and then it SMS a link to your friend. Do you have their friends contacts too? etc.

If you integrated with IFFTT, or somehow interacted with the first party features to extend them it'd be interesting, but even still then Amazon is only a few weeks away from doing any one of these things.

Thanks for the detailed comments!

We do recognise that in a sense we are competing against the native features of the platforms we are running on. But this is always a risk when building on top of platforms. If you take the analogy of mobile - iOS and Android both have native apps for things like notes and reminders - but this doesn't stop 3rd parties creating better versions of them for people that want a bit more in terms of functionality. This is what we're trying to do with Life Bot.

Right now our differentiators may be small, but people are finding them useful and we're working hard to add more based on the feedback we're getting. (Stay tuned!)

Whilst Amazon and Google could have teams sitting there looking out for popular voice apps they could copy features from and implement natively, based on the big pushes they are making to try and bring 3rd party developers to the platform, in my opinion it would be a strange thing for them to do if they just constantly copied the popular ones as native features.

For example the way I see it is that for Amazon, the goal is to get more people shopping through voice. By building an great productivity experience on top of Alexa we're not going against this, in fact we think we'll aid it by the fact more people will want to buy the devices because of the features of Life Bot.

On the invocation --> Having to say "Life Bot" as well as Alexa or Google is additional work for the user, but we think that this is worth it for the enhanced features.

On monetisation --> there are definitely options available to us, for example premium features. But as I'm sure you've seen by testing the product we're still quite early and won't be doing this anytime soon. Amazon are also paying the top skill developers quite significant amounts (https://developer.amazon.com/alexa-skills-kit/rewards) if your a developer looking for a bit of extra $ I would definitely check that out!

On contact sharing --> This is something we don't do currently but are exploring as it's been requested quite a few times.

Hopefully that explains our view on all your points - thanks again for testing out the Skill and sharing such detailed feedback!

> Whilst Amazon and Google could have teams sitting there looking out for popular voice apps they could copy features from and implement natively, based on the big pushes they are making to try and bring 3rd party developers to the platform, in my opinion it would be a strange thing for them to do if they just constantly copied the popular ones as native features.

Every single successful platform does exactly this. Facebook, Google, Apple.

> On the invocation --> Having to say "Life Bot" as well as Alexa or Google is additional work for the user, but we think that this is worth it for the enhanced features.

As someone who has an Echo Show, an Echo dot, and an original echo, I can tell you that the friction added by having to say the skill name makes me never use it. I can imagine this is the case for a vast majority of non-power users who don't use IFTTT or some other niche skill.

> On monetisation --> there are definitely options available to us, for example premium features. But as I'm sure you've seen by testing the product we're still quite early and won't be doing this anytime soon. Amazon are also paying the top skill developers quite significant amounts (https://developer.amazon.com/alexa-skills-kit/rewards) if your a developer looking for a bit of extra $ I would definitely check that out!

Your payment is based on your ability to keep your replacement experiences better than Amazons and all of their competitors, as well as all of the other skills that can focus on just one of your features and out-sprint you.

Looks like you have a lot of experience building skills and thinking about voice interactions. If I were you - I'd focus on providing something truly unique through voice - something that Apple, Google, or Amazon can't squash you with by sneezing. Even all the stuff covered in your tech crunch article is already done by competitors in some form.

I wish you luck. I don't expect you to find a way to monetize this faster than Google Amazon or Apple will find a way to monetize skills in general, in which case you'll be competing against niche apps for every feature you provide under the life bot umbrella. This will spread you thin. And I would be totally surprised if you raised money on the idea.

Sorry for the hyper critical feedback. Y'all seem super passionate and I want to see more cool voice apps for my Echo. But I can't help but feel many skills developers are simply re-inventing the wheel.

This is an interesting play in the voice space...kind of reminds me of the role Dropbox has played in online storage vs GOOG, MSFT, AAPL, AMZN, etc. By being platform agnostic, users can get a unified and better experience across their devices.

Right now voice is cool, but to me it's a little bit of a gimmicky feature that acts differently across devices from different ecosystems. It makes it that much harder to universally change my behavior toward voice across the different devices I use. I can see how Life Bot could change that.

Have you guys thought about the ecosystem dynamics for Life Bot? Do you think the big players will play nice if you start to own the voice relationship with the user, instead of AMZN/GOOG/MSFT/AAPL?

hey! thanks so much for your comment. That last point is a good one - the way we see it is that the big players have to be nice - because there is so much competition between them - it would dis-encourage the developer community from dedicating time to building amazing voice experiences if they started making the platform less open or blocking certain features. So far we've worked really closely with the Alexa and the Google team when developing Life Bot and both have been really supportive and helpful.

I sort of get the cross device thing, but who owns, uses and switches between multiple voice assistant devices?

Seems sort of like an Echo/Home plus, where you could just get crushed if Amazon starts adding the ability to send texts or something.

Right now your right probably not many people, but as digital assistants get integrated into more and more devices this will become a problem for a lot of people!

Agree Amazon could just add SMS to their reminders - but we're working on a whole lot more features that we think can be Echo / Home + as you say!

"Life Bot solves this by bringing the most-used features under one voice app."

The most used features are able to be asked to Alexa directly.

Are you helping users that may not want to set up IFTTT triggers for actions?

You're right that Alexa does a lot of these features natively, but what we're trying to do is make each one better for users.

For example with reminders, we allow users to get notified of the reminders they set where ever they are via SMS. Or for news we give users the option of texting the full article to their phone.

Right now we're starting with simple productivity features, but going forward we want to make it easier for Alexa users to interact with other third party services without having to enable a whole bunch of different Skills.

IFTTT is a great service but a lot of Alexa users aren't familiar with it.

"For example with reminders, we allow users to get notified of the reminders they set where ever they are via SMS."

This was my #1 most desired feature!! Thank you

No worries! Great to hear!! :)

If there's anything else you'd like to see added just let me know at om@asklifebot.com

>For example with reminders, we allow users to get notified of the reminders they set where ever they are via SMS.

Why SMS over the calendar or other reminder features that are built into every smartphone?

Do you have a website? Am interested to learn more but I don't have any Alexa-enabled devices, so I can't really use your link.

Yes you can find more info at http://www.asklifebot.com

Right now we're just on Alexa but will be coming to other platforms very soon!

wrong twitter link on your home page

Thanks!! :) - updated!

I would be most interested in running this on my Linux desktop. I will not allow Alexa or any other closed-source cloud-connected sensors in my home for security reasons.

Hey everyone I'm Jess the other cofounder of Life Bot thanks for all your comments so far

The Life Bot has been really great and responsive around their private Facebook group.

They shared that they will be opening up a developer friendly API to allow easy integrations with Alexa.

Im looking forward to this.

Thanks!

We're working on ways for developers to enhance Life Bot - stay tuned! :)

Thanks for your comment :)

IFTT (www.iftt.com) will also provide SMS reminders through Alexa.

You're right you can also do this through ITFF!

We think it's easer through Life Bot though as at no stage do you have to create an account. Setup is all through voice and SMS!

hey! thanks for your comment. We recognise that IFTT can do reminders, but our aim with Life Bot is to hide as much of the setup process as possible from our users. For example the set up process is really easy with Life Bot. On 1st time use, we ask for their phone number which they speak, then we text them asking for their name and email. The next time they open the skill we confirm their time zone and then they are ready to go with the reminders feature.

Hey .. see a good monetization strategy will be hyper local shopping.. give something for local players to compete with Amazon..

I'm still confused at what voice app is. And the link takes me a to a login page- there's you first problem in terms of discover-ability...

Thanks - agree discoverability is an issue on Alexa! If you have an Alexa device just say "Alexa, enabled Life Bot". Or you can enable directly from amazon.com at this link:

https://www.amazon.com/www-asklifebot-com-Life-Bot/dp/B0749C...

Sounds cool, I don't have an Echo though. When can I get this on my other devices?

Hey! thanks for your comment. We're launching on Google Assistant in a couple of weeks so watch out for that. After that we'll launch on Cortana as well. We keep everyone updated on our fb group about new releases if you wanted to join :) https://www.facebook.com/groups/lifebot/

Joined! Looking forward to trying this out, thanks

What was your uniq selling point for YC?

I think yc is looking more towards founders than problems being solved.. Makes sense too for early stage ventures..

Why? What problem is this solving?

Right now, the biggest problem Life Bot solves for Alexa users is that we bring voice reminders out of the home - If you set a reminder using Alexa, it's only useful if you're around the device to hear it go off. Life Bot sends you your reminder via SMS so where ever you are you'll get it!

As we add more productivity features to Life Bot, we're also removing the need for user's to remember multiple invocation names for different skills.

Finally in the future we see people having to use multiple voice assistants during their day. You might have an Amazon Echo at home, but an Android phone with Google Assistant on it, and maybe even Cortana in your car. Life Bot will be on all platforms which will give you a consistent experience across all of them.

Cross platform is a selling point for me at least.

Will you integrate with standard calendar technology? E.g. caldav etc?

I'm still not convinced that voice is a platform - it seems like more of a feature to me...

Yes calendar integration will be included in the next release - we're going to start with Google Calendar but will add more of the most popular calendar services as we go.

I'm not 100% familiar with caldav but will look into it!

In terms of voice as a feature vs. platform - I think right now it appears to many to be a feature, because the quality and capability of voice apps is just not that great. Most voice apps offer a sub-set of the functionality available on mobile or web, so from a phycological point of view when you use one it feels like just a small (and often not as good) feature of the main product. However as the accuracy of the underlying speech to text and natural language understanding of these platforms gets better, and as the capability of voice apps gets better, we see voice becoming a much more easy and natural way for people to access their favourite products, services, and content.

Whenever you want something, you'll just ask your assistant, and because you may be using multiple platforms, we think Life Bot will be the best way to do this that maintains the context of what you like / don't like.

Definitely still early days though - but that's the vision!

Cool! Installed :D

Awesome! Would love to hear your feedback!!

Launch HN: Life Bot (YC S17) – Voice app to help with daily activities