| To me this reads like marketing fluff. A lot of the purported use cases amount to "better Siri/Alexa". It also fails to convincingly answer the most obvious question: > The primary argument against all these AI gadgets so far has been that the smartphone exists. Why, you might ask, do I need special hardware to access all this stuff? The proposed answer is because smartphones are too hard to use(???) > To do almost anything on your phone, you have to take the device out of your pocket, look at it, unlock it, open an app, wait for the app to load, tap between one and 40,000 times, switch to another app, and repeat over and over again. And an allusion to app stores being bad: > And they’re not going to get better, not as long as the app store business model stays the way it is. The part that's left unsaid is that none of these AI devices promise to be some new open model of computing. Instead it's a play at the same or more lock in than with app stores. The Humane pin, for example, requires an expensive ($24/mo) subscription to even use the hardware. The lock in is just in a new playing field where the incumbents don't have a dominant position yet. |
Those complexities and problems are real, but the obvious value of a context-aware AI is reducing friction by hiding those complexities from the user. So they can state a goal and have the right tools to achieve that goal selected and/or used for them.
Forcing someone to use a half-dozen devices instead of a half-dozen apps is doing the opposite: It's increasing complexity and friction for the user, by adding extra steps between "this is my goal" and "goal accomplished".