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Comment by stevage | Hacker News Reader

The great thing about a product like this is that it's so easy to fake it in video.

I don't really buy that typing speed is a bottleneck for most people. We can't actually think all that fast. And I suspect AI is doing a lot of filling in the gaps here.

It might have some niche use cases, like being able to use your phone while cycling.

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I fear that if AI filling the gapsis competing with your own thoughts while using it, your lazy brain goes the easy way and accepts the insinuations of themachine as its own. Beating the entire purpose of having a gizmo that writes down "your very own" thoughts.

That is if this exists. But if it does, it's not what you think it does for you.

Yeah, good point. Especially because most of the time our thoughts are a lot more fuzzy than we might think. Having it put words to it will feel like it's "augmenting" or "clarifying" our thoughts, but in reality it might be just controlling it.

I'm wondering if my Alterego usage will justify my ADHD meds.

in conversations people do finish your sentences (sometimes) which i personally find annoying if they especially finish them incorrectly and i have to take a pause and correct them - but it doesn't force me to accept their words as my thoughts...

Personal anecdote: I do find typing to be a bottleneck in situations where typing speed is valuable (so notes in meetings, not when coding).

I can break 100wpm, especially if I accept typos. It's still much, much slower to type than I can think.

Speech to text can be 130-200 wpm.

Also, keybr.com helps speed up typing if you were thinking about it.

> notes in meetings

That’s already solved by AI, if you let AI listen to your meetings.

I haven't found that to be very accurate. I suspect the internal idiosyncrasies of a company are an issue, as the AI doesn't have the necessary context.

Seems like it would be much easier to solve that problem than it would be to cross the brain barrier and start interfacing with our thoughts, no? Just provide some context on the company etc

“Sounds like it would” yes, but on practice no off the self solution works remotely well enough.

> Just provide some context on the company etc

The necessary “context” includes at least the name and pronunciation of the names of all workers of a company with a non English first name, so it's far from trivial.

> off the self

Was that deliberate, or a typo? I am genuinely wondering!

It's a typo.

Not when I want my notes to contain my own thoughts or reminders to myself. That's only in my head and today I either have to miss out on what is being said next to type it out, speak up in that moment (even if not really on topic), or lose the thought entirely.

My experience with taking notes in meetings is definitely that the brain is the bottleneck, not the fingers. There are times where I literally just type what the person is saying, dictation style (ie, recording a client's exact words, often helpful for reference, even later in the meeting). I can usually keep up. But if I'm trying to formulate original thoughts, or synthesise what I've heard, or find a way to summarise what they have been saying - that's where I fall behind, even though the total number of words I need to write is actually much smaller.

So this definitely wouldn't help me here. Realistically though, there ought to be better solutions like something that just listens to the meeting and automatically takes notes.

If you want something free, available right now, and dependent on only an IME, have you considered learning a stenotyping/chording keyboard layout?

https://www.openstenoproject.org/plover/

Yes, but having the discipline to practice enough to get faster than my normal typing speed has been an obstacle.

It's possible the demo is faked, and I'm skeptical. But I also don't think the speed is really the point of a device like this. Getting out a device, pressing keys or tapping on it, and putting it away again, those attentional costs of using some device... I know something like basic notetaking would feel really different to me if I was able to just do the thing in the demo at high accuracy instead. That's a big if, though - the accuracy would have to be high for it to really be useful, and the video is probably best-case clips.

Typing speed is very much a bottleneck when I'm washing dishes, at least.

talk then

Not ideal, between sound from the washing itself plus whatever else is going on in the house, and I'd rather not add noise that others have to deal with. That said, it's certainly in the mix as competing with other potential solutions.

How about when baking?

https://xkcd.com/341/

Then, too. I cannot compete with Mrs Roberts.

learn more on: https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/alterego/overview/

also adding their press release here:

https://docsend.com/view/dmda8mqzhcvqrkrk/d/fjr4nnmzf9jnjzgw

I think the idea here is a very different mode of programming. Less prompting, waiting, seeing results, prompting again (where typing is not the bottleneck)

But more having a conversation with a really fast coding agent. That should feel like you’re micro-managing an intern as they code really fast, you could start describing the problem and it could start coding and you interject and tell it to do do things differently. There the bottleneck would be typing, especially if you have fast inference. But with voice now you’re coding at the speed of your thoughts.

I think doing that would be super cool but awkward if you’re talking out loud in an office, that’s where this device would come in.

Pulling out my phone, unlocking it, opening my notes app, creating a new note, that is a bottleneck.

Puling out my phone, unlocking it, remembering what the hotkey is today for starting google/gemini, is a bottle neck. Damned if I can remember what random gesture lets me ask Gemini to take a note today (presumably gemini has notes support now, IIRC the original release didn't).

Finding where Google stashes todo items at, also a bottle neck. Of course that entails me getting my phone out and navigating to whatever notes app (for awhile todos/notes were inside a separate Google search app!) they are shoved into.

My Palm Pilot from 2000 had more usability than a modern smartphone.

This device can solve all of those issues.

>This device can solve all of those issues.

If you're wearing it at the right moment.

Most people i think type very slowly on computers and i believe type even more slowly on phones. I've had many many people remark at how fast i type on both of those platforms and it still confuses me, as i think it's so easy for me to overlook how slowly people type.

You’re also underestimating that some people think really quickly. Way faster than you can type.

I also think i think very quickly and faster than i can type :-D

I agree that it's an easy to fake demo and at the same time, if they're going to fake it, why make it seem so slow?

As to whether typing speed is a bottleneck for most people, maybe not most people, but definitely some people, and it's a massive bottleneck for me personally.

I think better when I'm talking and since I have started using speech to text, it has increased my writing speed and coding speed by at least an order, maybe two orders of magnitude.

But you are right, the AI filling in gaps can really cause trouble using speech, goodness knows what it's doing using sub-speech.

>I agree that it's an easy to fake demo and at the same time, if they're going to fake it, why make it seem so slow?

Honestly I have no idea if it's fake. I wouldn't be surprised if it's both fake and real: the actual video is entirely fake, but a reasonably accurate demonstration of actual capabilities (like a lot of tech demos at live events...)

Plausible deniability is the ticket. I see the killer app here being communication with people in comas. Or corpses.

Or dogs

> We can't actually think all that fast.

One of the major ways you can speed up reading, is that you stop 'vocalizing' each word in your head. It does seem that thinking is much faster than 'thinking aloud' (in your head)

> while cycling

depends on what they are connected to in the back there.

Typing is a big bottleneck. Speak for yourself

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