Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

> Points at dog, "what's this", "it's a dog"

> Points at sign saying New York Stock Exchange, "what's this", "it's the NYSE"

These are impressive in that we did not have software that could do these sorts of things a few years ago, but they are functionally useless examples. People do not do this beyond writing tech reviews or a tech demo for a friend.

I'd really like to see useful demonstrations, of things that I actually want to know. For example I saw a tower on the horizon ~15 miles away and wanted to know what tower it was, I pointed my phone at it and zoomed in extremely far, and asked Google Lens, and it gave me the wikipedia page. This is materially better in two ways: first I can zoom in past all the other towers in my field of view, and second I get the wikipedia page, on a screen, I don't know what information I need about it, it sort of depends on what it is, and that page is a good place to go for that.

What other demos do we have for these devices (R1, AI Pin) of real world scenarios? So far the reporting is lacking on these, and where they have been demoed (e.g. AI Pin translation) it has been with poor results.

If you couldn't see, those go from trivial to potentially very useful, I'd think - consider "Am I holding a $5 or a $20?"

I believe at least on iOS the camera/reader app can already do that. There was a video by BlindSurfer on youtube where he showed the feature.

This seems to be a recurring theme. People aren’t aware of what their devices already are capable of.

Part of that is because it’s sold as accessibility or out of the way enough that people don’t encounter them regularly.

But even then, a lot of the stuff is right there in the photos app (what plant/bug/animal is this) or sign reading and OCR

100%. The iOS vision accessibility APIs are top notch and consistent throughout the system. A simple example, Siri describes the image in the notification if you have announce messages turned on

Accessibility is the biggest use-case I can see for all this stuff, and if that's what we get from this wave of AI, then great. But that's not how any of it is being pitched, and the tech itself is not particularly accessibility friendly in other ways so I don't think it's properly on the radar of these companies.

> These are impressive in that we did not have software that could do these sorts of things a few years ago, but they are functionally useless examples.

I disagree.

Here's a thing I'd like to do that I can't do today:

I go out for a 15 minute walk. I turn my device on. When I get back, I have a text file about my walk annotated with what I saw, landmarks, weather, perhaps an unusual car, and what I bought at the coffeeshop, all taken from the camera alone.

That's useful, doesn't exist now, but could exist in the future, using technology like this.

I'm interested in what your use-case is. I understand the feature request, but I don't understand why a text file of those things is something I'd want.

I think there are some very interesting accessibility use-cases here, but that's not how the tech is being pitched.

personally, i’d love this, as long as i know everything is staying local and not being sold/shared for a profit.

i regularly find myself thinking things like “what movie was i talking about with that guy in the gym?” or “what did i tell my wife we needed to get at the drug store?”

while i have gotten into a habit of keeping a long running note in my phone, there are still lots of blind spots in my memory that leave these fragmented mini-mysteries. having a machine that i could ask “what was that song playing in the supermarket i wanted to download?” and get a useful answer would be a huge boon in my life, if only to quiet the anxiety of leaving these threads hanging in my mind.

Fwiw, “what did i tell my wife we needed to get at the drug store?” is actually our household's main use case for Amazon Alexa.

Granted, you have to be home for that, but "Alexa add pickles to the shopping list" is something we're all accustomed to saying now, to the device in the kitchen. Then whoever does the shopping checks that list whenever they go out.

In the Unbox therapy video it did say what breed the dog is. That is useful!

What about mutts? Would be cool if dog physiognomy is so advanced it could identify distinct breed percentages. Then we could apply it to humans. That would be useful!

Your phone can do that though. It's built into iOS, and I believe on Android it's part of Google Lens.

Yeah but for me I am thinking of how kids can use this to learn things around them

Genuine question, is that something we really need?

That's a lot of hardware and compute just to have a gadget that helps identify dog breeds, assuming the dog is purebred to begin with.

One step closer to the app I always dreamed of:

"Can I eat this?"

Pic of random foliage > is this safe to eat

Would you trust an LLM with that question though? I know I wouldn't.

Alternatively you could ask the owner holding the dog.

I don't disagree that knowing the breed might be nice, but again I feel like it lacks a real-world use-case. How many dogs do I see in day to day life that are unaccompanied? None.

> These are impressive in that we did not have software that could do these sorts of things a few years ago,

Google lens has been doing this for ages.

All the good stuff starts out looking like toys.

But it’s not the start? My phone has had this for six years.

All the toys start out looking like toys too.

The Frisbee started out as a pie tin

https://time.com/3667058/frisbee-history/

Being a toy implies some niche of users is getting fun out of the product. Who's having fun here and how?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com