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Comment by onlyrealcuzzo | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this a plateaued market?

Amazon, Google, and Apple are already entrenched in the space. It's not like any of them have toxic brands like Oracle where everyone is dying to free themselves. Most people are happy with their products.

This seems like a tough move...

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I haven't kept up. Are Siri, Alexa or Google's smart speakers any good now? Or are they still mostly for setting timers and controlling spotify?

Judging by the frequent frustration I've witnessed whenever visiting two separate friends who own Alexas, no they are not good now.

On another note, I am continuously flabbergasted that even Google cannot get an agentic LLM assistant right. I used to use the Google Assistant ALL the time when it did not make use of LLM's. It was AMAZING. I could just say "wake me up at 7" and it would understand that I meant 7AM the next day, or call "mom", or "set a timer for 10 minutes" while I'm cooking. It was genuinely useful to me.

Google Assistant last week sent me to the Google Search page with my prompt "wake me up at 7am", and Gemini read out loud "setting an alarm for 7am tomorrow morning". But it was bullshit, it doesn't have the power to set alarms, it was just gaslighting me.

> Gemini read out loud "setting an alarm for 7am tomorrow morning". But it was bullshit, it doesn't have the power to set alarms, it was just gaslighting me.

The Gemini on my Google Home has the ability to set alarms. Maybe it's a permissions issue on your device.

I'm talking about the Google app on every Android with gapps on it. It used to be able to do this for you, and now it just does web search. It's a massive downgrade.

Gemini sets alarms for me in Android all the time via voice chat all the time. Did you give it permission to interact with the apps?

Can't speak for the other's but Siri asks me if I wanna use ChatGPT when the questions get hard

I've had a good time using my Google Home devices exclusively as kitchen timers and music playing devices, though they semi frequently get song requests wrong.

Not sure about the others, but a Google Home device with Gemini enabled gives you basically short conversational LLM interactions. It can set timers and play music and all that, but you can also pretty much ask it any random question and it will give you an LLM answer.

It's far more useful than the previous Google Assistant answers which were always of the form, "According to petmd.com - [direct quote]".

I had one of those Apple speakers (HomePod Mini) and the only other thing I ever did with it was speaker phone calls. It was really good that that.

I ended up selling it for $50 or something.

The other article pitched it as an "AI Companion". I can see the market already; virtual girlfriends or virtual friends for the homebound. People will buy a "Companion subscription" that will allow them to talk their friend all day. It will be very successful. I feel bad for any human moderators that will have to wade through these conversations.

But why can’t this exist on a smartphone? A huge existing install base and, in an iPhone at least, compute capability that will surely far exceed anything that OpenAI can produce.

I would think it is pesky Apple permissions in the way. OpenAI with camera and microphone will literally suck up all your data without Apple being the middle man.

By starting this line of devices I can Open Ai working to create Joi the virtual girlfriend from Bladerunner 2049. https://youtu.be/y-a3YshkPRc

For a moment I read "Jony the virtual girlfriend" and visualized a smiley avatar of Mr Ive greeting you when coming home.

Judging by how much effort Apple puts into its speakers it isn't a large market, probably not even on the scale of their headphones.

Between Apple's poor quality AI, Amazon continually trying to sell you more stuff and Google flogging your attention to every corporation out there I'm surprised anybody buys these products anymore.

Gotta start v1 somewhere and ChatGPT was and is a big enough threat to Google Search.

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