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Comment by melvinmelih | Hacker News Reader

> we could solve this dead time problem and start doing things on the go

Interesting idea, but how do you address car safety concerns? Studies consistently show that cognitive distraction, even with voice interfaces, can significantly increase crash risk. Wouldn’t managing emails and calendars while driving still fall into that category?

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Phone calls while driving are pretty clearly in the Overton window of 'safe things you can do in a car', and it doesn't seem a priori obvious to me that this is worse. Though I do agree with you that in an ideal world people wouldn't even take phone calls and would instead focus 100% of their effort on not killing me.

(cofounder here) Fair concern - cognitive distraction is real. We see it more like taking a phone call while driving (which people already do). We're purposely keeping interactions simple to make sure features aren't too distracting, and are working on a 'safe mode' that limits you to basic read-only operations while driving. We're actively researching attention management to make it simpler. Safety comes first.

> We see it more like taking a phone call while driving (which people already do).

And which we know is highly unsafe: https://unews.utah.edu/up-to-27-seconds-of-inattention-after...

Maybe you can talk about other "dead time" without safety impact - e.g. doing my laundry involves low mental workload but my hands aren't free!

Got it - makes sense. The laundry example is perfect. Moments where your hands are tied or when you want screen-free time

There are so many times other than driving that voice is the preferred medium here. It feels like just one example. (And as others pointed out, taking a hands-free phone call during a drive is not at all provocative these days, to the point that it feels like an odd thing to fixate on personally.)

Given that they dented their call while doing the demo, it doesn't seem weird to fixate on. I think the criticism is valid, given the framing presented and the pitch used to investors.

Also, audio interfaces incur different amounts of mental load / distraction. I wouldn't be surprised if this was more distracting than just talking to a person.

I think the car dent story originally came from - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45008239. As I clarified there - the dent happened before the April demo, during hackathon stress while taking out the car from parking.

But totally valid criticism about cognitive load - better example could be dog walking, cooking or screen free time.

It should really be made clearer in your post that that the crash was not from speaking with April, as it's a bit unclear. Cool product, good luck!

Oh gosh - good point. Sorry! (I watched the other demo video and didn't see this)

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