With AI, the future of augmented reality is in your ears | Hacker News Reader

With AI, the future of augmented reality is in your ears

crazystupidtech.com

30 pointsrmason25 comments

I remember setting geofenced reminders maybe even 10 years ago ("remind me X when I'm near the supermarket") and they were pretty cool but sat squarely in that zone where they were useful enough to be interesting but not reliable enough that you could count on them (the number of times I got a reminder 5 minutes after I left a place was a lot) - so the applications where you could seriously use them sat in a very narrow band.

This is probably one of a litany of missed opportunities I see where specifically Google missed the boat around 2010 - 2015. So much of what we have today they were already rolling out on phones as smart features ("Google Now" etc), and somehow it all faltered or even went backwards (I could reliably in set reminders by voice in 2013 I think, but by 2018 they were so unreliable I gave up).

What I don't understand here is how they are going to do all this tracking and ambient AI without destroying your phone battery. I'm surprised Apple especially will even allow a background process to run that is doing that much.

> What I don't understand here is how they are going to do all this tracking and ambient AI without destroying your phone battery

Possibly related explanation here "Now Playing: Continuous low-power music recognition" https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

This will be used to serve ads. Imagine walking past a place and you hear an as about that business.

I don’t want anything spoken that I did not as for explicitly.

Exactly. Locally hosted must be maintained as a viable option by volunteers, or the audio llm equivalent of YouTube circa 2006 will gradually become YouTube circa 2024…

Especially dystopic when it infers your identity.

Minority Report clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bXJ_obaiYQ

Any sufficiently advanced ads technology is indistinguishable from the perfect recommendation system.

The perfect recommendation system is one that fucks off until I explicitly ask for a recommendation and doesn't fund a shady network of data brokers hovering up every bit of data they can get their hands on. So it's not very like advanced ads technology.

The perfect recommendation system is one that predicts when you'll explicitly ask for a recommendation, so you don't have to.

Perfect according to whom? You are not developing it, your needs are only as relevant as it brings money to whoever is developing the recommendation system.

A recommendation system that never interrupts you is less rentable, it’s like discrete and decent ads, it’s called a phone book and it died a long time ago because there’s no money in that anymore.

The thing is - how do they avoid getting Foursquared again by Apple and Google respectively. Apple and Google can do the same thing with voice and with their OS advantage, it will be seamless and built in.

This sort of OS advantage is why companies are now required to show you available options when you furst use certain features. I'm not saying the current approach here is the best mitigation, but for instance on IOS during the OS setup, you're asked to pick a default browser. Similarly on Chrome on a new machine, I was recently asked to pick a search engine before I could use the search bar, showing several options.

I wonder which one was defaulted to or first one in the list. That one will gain 90% of the users’ choice.

It's randomized.

Ok, then it’s as fair as it gets.

Random

Ok, it’s fair then

A word of self-ad, but we are currently trying to make an app that would be your constant in-headphones AI chat/assistant. (definitely would not work in crowds)

https://testflight.apple.com/join/gEV9nq4m

Android is also available, but very buggy: https://play.google.com/apps/testing/ai.borgcloud.assistant

P.S. please don't pound the backend)

Gross.

> “The new company is building a service that leverages the enormous corpus of data in large AI systems and newly ubiquitous headphones. Then it’s adding the capabilities of a smartphone to surface relevant local information as and when a person walks by a location, such as a restaurant, a cocktail bar, or even a street corner.”

> “He talks about attempting to make sense of it all while staying true to his original mission: building things that help people better experience the world around them.”

I am not exactly certain if I want my headphones interrupting my train of thought as I walk down the street. But I would actually like asking a question and getting an answer. An AI that understood my preferences and my current location.

Well Gemini with gmaps will do that very very soon

Says it all:

>OM: When I see “Her,” I see two aspects to the movie. One is very dystopian, and the other is that it is a love story. It was a story of someone who was lonely and looked for a connection. Silicon Valley has totally missed that part. Valley’s missing empathy gene is reinforced in how everyone talks about agents and personal agents. So what is that more optimistic, more humanistic future we can build from an AI perspective?

I can't think of a more pointless use-case of 'AI' than these round-about ways to solve what seems to be the root-cause of all of these 'moonshot' projects: people who build these tools lack or are completely absent of social skills. (Never mind the loneliness epidemic of Gen Z and Alpha who were born with the modern Internet.)

I'm like many of you am an introvert by nature, I always had to take 2-3 days off after a conference when I was a founder because of the toll it took on me, but I can't think of anything other than continuous exposure to have ever worked get over this issue... but more importantly the fact that it is stuff like this that continues to funnel money from VCs just make me think what an absolute waste of capital takes place at this phase of this technology.

The guy admits he builds the same thing over and over, and assuming that this takes off I just can't help but affirm my intuition that most of these usecases vary from useless to complete vaourware.

We are so far away from the future where this tech can actually be used to create models and train them to solve things like climate change or even traffic, instead we are in the iterate the 'pokemon go but with AI' phase... which I will remind you was an ad-based venture from google.

We really need to create a new internet, the signal to noise ratio ever since social media has been so abysmal.

I don't buy it. I'm an introvert but happily married now. But I can still see the appeal of a very personalized AI

> I don't buy it. I'm an introvert but happily married now. But I can still see the appeal of a very personalized AI

That doesn't surprise me, some of the most loneliest people are married after all, hence why extra martial affairs have been monetized from everything from online porn/camsites to Ashley Madison--with married men being targeted demographic.

I guess my point is that for those who cannot find a way to engage with another Human in person, this seems like the only way to 'conform' to social norms while not being depressingly alone. This maybe modern darwnism playing out in the 21st century where all external stress factors have been mostly alleviated in affluent Western societies, because it is the undeveloped World who is keeping the species going fertility wise, but confining the genetic pool to such non-diversity has its issues, though.

But as I said, personally if left to my own devices I can go weeks without speaking to anyone and be entirely fine and jump right back into the fray when I need/feel to: oddly enough when most were locked down during the pandemic and 'going crazy' from isolation I was an 'essential worker' and continued everything but my gym/clubbing/dating life (I saw my friends, also essential workers, in person on a regular basis): only to get burned out by 2021 and hide for a Summer in the Adriatic Sea in a remote island almost entirely by myself--a few close friends would occasionally come to check up on me so we swam and bbq'd at the beach near my house.

It took me a day or two when I returned to normal civilization, I forgot how loud it was to be in a city, but was entirely fine and started dating again by Fall of '21.

couldn't take this article seriously considering it doesn't mention Meta's Rayban smart glasses, which largely does what they want already: a pair of glasses without visuals but with AI in your ears

Yeah at this point it's almost jumping on a new hype bandwagon to "come up" with the idea of ambient audio based AI.

The kicker here though is since it's all driven by a phone in your pocket (a) it will either kill your battery or not be allowed at all by the platform, and (b) it has no camera, so it has no idea what you are actually seeing or looking at so it will be a second class citizen to all the versions of this that are camera enabled (such as, as you mention, the RayBans).

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