Ask HN: What would a truly useful AI personal assistant look like to you? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What would a truly useful AI personal assistant look like to you?

3 pointsnunodonato10 comments

Yes, we have alexa, siri and google assistant.

They all do cool stuff. I can check the weather, know my agenda for the day, and get a joke told. Some of these are somewhat useful, others a cool stuff to show or try one time.

I feel a truly useful personal assistant is not yet here (am I wrong? please share projects I may not know about). This is a field where I have a lot of personal interest and have been brainstorming some ideas. I'm very curious to pick your brains too and know from the HN crowd what would a truly useful personal assistant based on AI look like? What would be able to do that you can't ask alexa or siri?

I'm always reminded of the next-level AI in the movie Her, and how the AI manages email and is able to naturally respond and carry out tasks.

I think a personal assistant is, by definition, aware of all the important things in your life. An integration with every significant email box, calendar, note taking app, etc... would be a significant part of its "wisdom" and ability to truly help out.

What kind of dialogs do you dream of having with a digital personal assistant? How would your day be easier with it available in your pocket?

Disclaimer: I do have a personal pet project for an AI digital assistant (leaning towards productivity)

I never read the book but I certainly agree with the title. I hope you find it useful

https://www.amazon.com/Better-Good-Machine-Than-Person/dp/19...

I really never got used to talking to my phone, even in private. But ok this is not the issue (you can always type it)

There is actually two very different questions :

What kind of dialogs do you dream of ? imagination has no limit as has already been stated in this thread.

What kind of dialogs would be both feasible and popular in the next 2-3 years ? This is the real deal (GPT-4 is around the corner)

It would be interesting (and most helpful for your project) if one of the FAANG released a detailed study on how people really used assistants in 2022, at least some kind of Top "vocal commands" list.

I have a pet assistant as a telegram bot. I type instead of speaking, for me is also strange to speak to the phone. So I ended up creating shortcuts to do things quickly( like 'r. buy milk 8:30' will add a reminder to buy milk, that will trigger at 8.30)

not sure of the usefulness of those statistics. People end up using that which works, so I guess we would see a lot of weather checks, navigation requests and stuff like that. If there is no real personal assistant, there won't be questions that would be directed to one. Like, no one is asking "do I have any new and urgent emails?", because we know that can't be answered with the current assistants

Even now, simple (but not so basic) productivity commands like reading/sending email and creating/editing note lists are possible. So, I think knowing how much people use them could still be a useful metric.

However, you actually touched a key problem relating to those generic assistants: if they are not really basic anymore but still very limited, how do we know what it can/can't do? RTFM? No way !

"Hey AI. I need x, y and z configured and implemented for client a."

*Ai does job*

"Aight cheers, fill the brew kettle and set temp to 72 we'll try squeeze in a double mash now works done before it's beach time."

hah, that's out of scope :) a true living PA would also not do your job, but help your coordinate and organize it

You're falling for the 'No True Scotsman' fallacy [0]

Don't cripple your AI because of your lack of imagination.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

really? Do people hire PAs to do their actual job? doesn't that conflict with the concept of what an assistant is?

not saying the idea isn't great, but if we focus on those, it's harder to focus on what is achievable and helpful right now (considering where AI capabilities are)

Well company directors hire people to do jobs. You could call any employee underneath them a PA. They're all helping to get the job done. Everybody is providing assistance to someone else.

If you break down my o.g comment a bit more tbh lots of it is achievable if not already existing in the market it just needs to be tied together and developed a bit further.

Speech to text, Text interpretation, Systems configuration, coding & app building. I'm sure I've missed plenty but you get the gist. Definitely achievable.

yes all those "pieces" are working today, but its a long stretch until you put them all together to work with such a command. Besides would you trust some AI bot with your github code? I've worked a lot with OpenAI codex, its amazing, but far from reaching that kind of achievements.

I still don't fully agree with your definition of a PA. An employee underneath is not a PA, the nature of the job itself is different.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com