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Comment by blackoil | Hacker News Reader

I haven't though this through, but this seems to be a good opportunity for MS to get back in consumer devices game.

They can expand on Surface/XBox brands to add Echo like ecosystem. Till now all smart devices/assistants aren't smart enough to be really useful beyond playing music and setting timer. GPT can change that, now the device can actually be useful. They have the momentum right now to build whole ecosystem around it. With latest increase in context length, complete user history can kept in sync across devices. Not sure if it is economically feasible.

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If the hardware is just a microphone and speaker that calls an API, why does the world need a new device? Every phone, tablet, laptop, game console, smart watch, smart speaker, smart doorbell, earbud and TV can do this already.

To justify adding yet another new piece of hardware, it would need to be something different. What would that be, exactly?

because absurdly the hardware is locked behind iron software gates.

i'm not aware of a device with a high-quality microphone where one can set their own custom Siri

The world is ready for smart jewelry worn around the neck, similar to Tab

The obvious one would be a dedicated device that just observes the world around you (sound, video, etc) and provides some kind of ambient intelligence to support your day in context. This cannot be done on a smartphone and none of the other devices move around with you. The big question is whether there is a killer use case for something like this.

Perhaps Microsoft could get back into cell phone space with a phone built from the ground up with an OpenAI OS of sorts. A phone designed with OpenAI in mind first.

I think the play is around intelligent meeting devices. A single device that connects to your internal data and becomes the ultimate meeting sidekick.

I’m thoroughly surprised, MS hasn’t built an Alexa like device but with chatgpt.

I know current events are a struggle but that’s the easy part of smart speakers.

Not exciting enough for a new consumer device.

OpenAI needs to leapfrog into robotics, that’s the only hardware that makes sense.

Was thinking the same yesterday.

Microsoft will make it cheaper but I'd also be very interested in a generic echo like smart home device that can be plugged into any LLM.

I have a few echos, and more google home devices, not a single one is plugged in anymore because I got tired of them not being capable enough or google doing stuff like adding "oh and by the way, if you ever want to do x you can ask me y".

No way to turn that shit off.

one of the issue is latency because users don’t wait for anything beyond near real-time.

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