I built this because I want to use it myself: many companies are advertising such technology but no one is shipping
The app can work with or without wearables so you can try the experience without buying anything
--- Update: wasn't expecting this post to get attention, so please let me know if I need any special tags like Show HN
For what actual gain? What percentage of a normal friendly conversation is something you want to actually review and document. Less than 5%?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyeCn7HlLck
Younger ears find it excruciating though.
+2 Charisma +1 Intelligence
A necklace with a helpful spirit living inside a silicon crystal. The spirit grows with every word it hears.
"First you wear it, then it wears you"
For people with memory issues, products like this can be life changing.
On a second note, imagine a world where everyone has perfect memory recall. The concept of "recording" someone is useless, as everyone around a conversation (e.g. sitting at the next table at a cafe) would be a 100% reliable witness to the conversation.
Obviously we would not fault someone for taking steps to train their memory to be better, so why fault them for using electronics to improve the limits of biology?
This describes the plot of a Black Mirror episode: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2089050 (S1 E3)
I guess if you're very good at remembering things and have no disabilities, the use-cases are only bad. That said, we shouldn't let assholes fuck things up.
Garbage people are a large and lucrative addressable market.
I’d also wonder about the legal situation; lots of places have laws against the covert recording of phone conversations, but I’m less sure about in-person private conversations.
I really think an open source experience is going to be the only way this specific area will advance (wearable voice assistants). Apple/Google/Amazon are always going to very conventional in how they think about the purpose of their products, how personalized they can be, how much they can be expected to understand the user.
Looking at the Apple prompts, it's notable how uninteresting they are. There is no real theory of function, no sense of relationship or roles. They are just letting that all default to some unspecified common sense (as found in the model), handling only the surface level of these interactions. And they don't appear to bake that into the model because that wouldn't be enough, because those deeper interactions require state that seems pretty clearly to not be specified. Anyway, I'm really going off on a prompting tangent.
I think there is _really_ deep stuff people could be creating using these building blocks. The kinds of developments that are a synthesis of modified personal behavior and the tools provided. A tool this powerful is being wasted (theoretically and right now in actuality) if you don't modify behavior when using it. But that's a terrible way to make a commercial product, you can't expect people to change for you. And so they create these very bland experiences that are the projection of their current apps onto a voice or AI interface.
And they aren't wrong to take this conservative approach... it's very boring but very rational. I think this is a particularly opportune moment for people with their own very personal and specific ideas about how integrate AI into a particular part of their life to try to actually build that experience, with an authentic goal of just improving their own life. An open source stack makes that possible... including the device, because Google and Apple just won't let you use a phone that way.
So this is very exciting! My dev kit is ordered, and I await it eagerly
With respect to recording I'll also be thinking about what kinds of uses are responsible. The existence of a recording doesn't mean I have to use it or store it. I honestly can't recall a time when, if I had been continuously recording, I would have used that recording against anyone present. I would expect to be as respectful of the privacy of people I interact with as I am now... I don't recount what people say to me now without considering if that what they said might have been in confidence, without considering how what they said might be interpreted differently by a different audience or out of context, and without passing on my most good faith interpretation of what they said. That's a complicated rule system, but it does actually fire when I recount other people's statements.
But I'll also have to navigate how I use it, understand what things it captures that I don't want it to, and how that affects the people around me.
Also I just want to see what's possible, without pre-censoring what's appropriate before we know how any of this stuff works in practice. I'm willing to take the risk it's all a bad idea and I'll soon think of it as a dead end.
My understanding is that this is one of them, and they changed the name shortly after the other was released.
Edit: ah seems the title has been updated
This renamed from Friend, and still (as of this comment) refers to itself as Friend in the home page footer links to the two variations of the product, Friend and Friend Dev Kit.
- The device itself is a Nordic Semiconductor BLE chip with GPIO, mic, and BLE.
- Audio is streamed (as OPUS) via BLE to the associated mobile device where some initial processing is handled.
- The audio is then passed to a FastAPI-based backend API service that handles integrations with Deepgram, etc.
Overall I think it's a clever way to handle this: you get to use very cheap hardware that sips power (battery) while utilizing the connectivity of the associated mobile device whether it be WiFi or cellular.
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I personally have wanted something like this for years -- but at the same time im anti surveillance - what would be interesting is "anti-surveillance surveillance"
Imagine placing these in the planter in a conference room... board room, green room. Stick one in the head-liner of an SUV used by political folks.
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(also not sure why "LED" is listed as a feature on the "connectivity" section...
I had posted earlier about a redditor who wanted to make a thing similar to this with whisper and such, for transcribing conversations at a corporate conference...
EDIT: from the FAQ in their discord:
> Q6: Will there be other STT (Speech To Text) Services allowed?
> Yes! We currently use Deepgram while we are developing the app but we plan to update the settings so users can choose a wide range of STT services like OpenAI's Whisper, Deepgram and we want to allow users to use there own hosted server for this.
Fully open source? So the AI models used are all free software with everything available?
> Live Transcription: Capture live voice and audio with human-level accuracy using OpenAI Whisper and Deepgram.
> Efficient Summarization: Get instant insights and summaries powered by ChatGPT in just 5 seconds.
Nope.
E.g. Can I use this device for any language or is it just English. Can it do translations?
When my son was growing up there were times I wish he didn’t have to struggle or guess as much.
(I do think AI/LLMs have a lot of potential for making life easier for autistic people, but ... this isn't it.)
In CA, recording me in a setting where I have the expectation of privacy is illegal, unless you have asked my permission first.
So yes, the law tells that to “millions of people,” if that many people decide to start recording conversations.
That has nothing to do with using an AI assistant that only listens to your voice and doesn’t store the recordings.
Or alternatively, get with the times and recognize that people will sometimes offload some of their mental processing onto silicon.
I totally understand the desire to have computers help us, but telling people to get over it is a blatant rejection of their desire to privacy.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
12 states, including california, disagree.
So again, what about people like me?
Sorry, but this is spyware in every sense of the definition. There's no argument against that there.
"Virtual Walls: Protecting Digital Privacy in Pervasive Environments"
https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~kotz/research/kapadia-walls/in...
fulfilling that request would make nearly all 'connected' devices untenable.
I absolutely agree with you , but from this point how does that actually happen? how do we shift away from minuscule connected devices that sense everything about the world around them when they come effortlessly cheap and absolutely invaluable?
Please consider whether you should publish something instead of just whether you can.
