[stavros]

They're "always" running, so they can notify you out of the blue, without you having to initiate a conversation. It's really nice UX to get a message from my assistant saying "hey, it's time to leave for the gym, and don't forget the supermarket bag because you're picking up milk on the way back, as you've run out".

[mpweiher]

Dunno, my calendar reminds me "out of the blue", without me having to initiate a conversation, that it's time to leave for the gym, no "claw" or "ai" involved.

I always have my backpack with me, so if I need milk I can pick it up on the way back. And I am pretty sure that I have to notice if I need milk myself.

The tech sounds cool, but whenever I hear about actual applications, I don't see the point.

[signatoremo]

That's because you just lack of imagination. Imagine if you have a human personal assistant, what would you ask them to do? Examples:

"Find me the cheapest ticket to Las Vegas for the first week of June. Buy one at anytime that you think is reasonable. Wait until no later than two months from now before buying. Get two tickets if my brother can also go".

"Email me if anyone posts a Sega multi mega for sale. But only if it's in black color".

I have no idea if OpenClaws can already do such a task or not, I don't have one, but it opens up new possibilities. If it isn't there yet, it will be.

[echoangle]

> Imagine if you have a human personal assistant, what would you ask them to do?

That’s kind of the confusing thing for me, I wouldn’t have a human personal assistant do anything for me as long as any money is on the line. I couldn’t teach them my preferences well enough to trust them to do it the way I want, instead of just doing it myself.

Personal assistants only make sense to me if you’re so rich that money doesn’t really matter to you anyways.

Your trip booking thing for example is something I would never give to a human assistant.

The alert for stuff on sale can already be done on the usual price tracking websites.

[signatoremo]

> I wouldn’t have a human personal assistant do anything for me as long as any money is on the line.

You don’t have to trust them with money. You can ask them to send you the info for you to do the final step.

> Your trip booking thing for example is something I would never give to a human assistant.

Maybe not you, but people already use personal travel agency for their booking need, see for example:

https://www.reddit.com/r/travelagents/comments/1i4fiod/best_...

Air ticket booking agency used to be popular before the Internet made that business obsolete.

> The alert for stuff on sale can already be done on the usual price tracking websites

Sega multi mega is a rare collectible item. No price tracking websites have it. You need to frequent online groups or forums of enthusiasts. eBay may have ones, but information (e.g color) may be missing, and follow-up is required. OpenClaw can do that for you.

[mpweiher]

Yes, there are probably people for whom this sort of thing can work.

For example, when I was at M$, management came to us extolling the virtues of Cortana and the then new "smart inbox". The manager was ecstatic. And for him, it maybe really was the neatest thing since sliced bread. And I know plenty of people with 10000+ unread in their INBOX. For them, it might be lifesaver.

But all the engineers in the room were "eek, get it away from me and make sure it never gets near my inbox". I personally maintain an INBOX-0 policy, not always perfectly, but it works for me. Unreads never last for more than a few minutes. So I have "situational awareness" of my e-mail, and when Apple also introduced smart inboxes, they broke that situational awareness while adding nothing whatsoever to my benefit. And people I communicate with also started losing e-mails, because they got sorted somewhere they weren't expecting.

So turn that shit off.

[mpweiher]

Thank you for illustrating my point perfectly: none of these scenarios you give as examples are things that resonate with me at all, and I wouldn't delegate them to a human personal assistant either.

[enraged_camel]

I mean, yes, some people have real issues with delegating tasks to others. Those people probably wouldn't get much benefit from an... AI assistant. That doesn't "illustrate your point", it just states the obvious.

[mpweiher]

You are confusing "issues" with "lack of need" and "lack of benefit of proposed solution".

Again, I think the tech is cool, and I would actually really like to both better understand and try out the tech. But to try something out in earnest, I need some concrete use-case, and so far the use-cases I have seen range from "meh" to "get it away from me".

For agentic coding, I also needed some concrete use cases, and I found where it worked really well, where it struggles, and where it's just horrible.

[enraged_camel]

Okay but like, some people don't live the types of lives where they could benefit from an assistant, either a real one or an AI one. I'm one such person. My life is pretty simple. I don't juggle a thousand different things, and am comfortable with taking care of everything myself. But I also recognize that not everyone is like that. I have a lot of friends who can barely stay on top of things. They have families, demanding jobs (sometimes more than one), lots of responsibilities, and they constantly forget to do stuff or postpone due to lack of time. I think tech like this, once (if) it becomes more reliable and user-friendly, could really gain a lot from them.

Bottom line is that there's a big difference between "not useful to me" and "not useful". If it was the latter, nobody would have human personal assistants either... but that's not the case.

[1659447091]

> Imagine if you have a human personal assistant, what would you ask them to do?

Those are not good examples for why people have a human assistant, you have human assistants to do in-person or person-to-person things that you don't have the time or desire to do yourself. They are simply not the same as releasing a 24/7 ai roulette process on the internet with all your payment and account info.

The online monitoring examples can be done with current automation tools and scripts

[mlsu]

If I had a human personal assistant, I'd tell him to clean my gutters, sweep the driveway, clean the kitchen table...

I understand, if we imagine a world where everyone is constantly plugged into the computer all the time, and every bit of human activity is coordinated and surveilled by the computer at all times, this shit appears to be quite useful. Otherwise and even if, it's total schlock.

Like, "hey openclaw can you order me groceries" is great, but the only reason is that there's a wageslave on the other side of that transaction who has to drive to the grocery storef and pick the groceries out. Pretty soon that slave is going to be all of us and my god it makes me feel like an insane person that the boosters of this tech don't see that.

[cube00]

Good luck ever getting this to work when airlines still refuse to publish APIs and captcha anything that looks automated.

[signatoremo]

Well, it will work when there is enough demand. “Ever” is very long time. Are you willing to bet on it?

The point still, is that OpenClaw opens new exciting (and dangerous) opportunities for non technical users.

[stavros]

If you don't have a need for a personal assistant, that's fine, not everyone does. That doesn't mean nobody does.

The milk thing was just an example of a tool that can intelligently combine things for you, not a literal "it's a calendar with a milk function".

This is a bit like "if I want to call my friends, I have a phone a home, why would I need a mobile?" which somewhat betrays a lack of imagination.

[olyjohn]

You're just not providing any good examples of what I cant already do with current automation tools.

[neodymiumphish]

My wife constantly asks me about adding books to her Kindle. I use Anna’s archive for this, but the process can be very annoying. I have to go to the site, search for the content. Filter by epub and English. Then download the content. Then send it to her Kindle email.

My openclaw now searches for the relevant content upon her request, sends the URL to a Stacks docker instance, monitors the Stacks instance for when the download completes, grabs the resulting epub from a local file share, then sends it to her kindle email. She doesn’t even send me the request anymore; she sends them straight to the Discord bot.

It also corrects our calendar every night. She often just through something on the calendar like “[son’s name] speech”, but we have speech appointments in either of two locations, and I have a strong preference for calendar items in the format “[person] - activity”. If she puts the city name with the speech appointments (“[son’s name] speech [town]”), openclaw reformats the title accordingly and adds the physical address of the speech therapy office we go to in that town. This means Apple Calendar sends us notifications when it’s time to leave, instead of just 30 mins prior.

I have a few others as well, but those are real world examples. Maybe they don’t matter for your use case, but they’re good for mine.

[samusiam]

But it's so easy to just download from libgen and send as an attachment to a Kindle email...

[neodymiumphish]

Are you being sarcastic?

Like sure, it is. But when I'm out doing something and she texts me a book title and author, I'd have to make a mental note to take care of it next time I'm free. It also means having a stack of epub files in my phone/tablet/laptop downloads that I've got no use for.

[dgellow]

Everything I’ve seen about it feels so over engineered

[netsharc]

Hmm, Google Gemini has access to my Google Tasks and can set reminders. It's also asked me if I want it to check something at "tomorrow 9am", and when I said yes, it managed to do that.

[stavros]

Yeah, that's kind of like it. Agents just have many many more integrations, so they can do many more things. For example, it knows all my preferences, and can search for flights and say things like "this one is more expensive, but skipping the morning wakeup is worth the $20".

[caminante]

But have you had consistently good experience with Google Gemini and Google apps? Or read the mixed reviews?

For me, Gemini has been hit or miss and somehow less useful than Assistant was 2+ years ago.

[netsharc]

The coding assistant for VSCode is nuts (i.e. gets it wrong a lot, also one time it just got so confused).

I have Gemini Pro for free for a year because I bought a Pixel phone, it answers very fast, so I like it. Let's see how I'll feel about shelling out real money when the subscription ends. But on the phone, I still use Assistant (and just have a shortcut to launch the webpage in my browser), because the phone was forcing Gemini, but after 5 minutes of usage I found it was slower for my usages (usually I just tell it to set an alarm and add a reminder/calendar event), and when I asked about my tasks, Gemini would get the task listing from Google Tasks, and keep it in its history... that'll pollute my chat history!

[caminante]

Sorry to hear that.

I've had a similar deal. "Free" means included, and we are the beta testers!

In the last month, Gemini successfully persisted Google notes and calendar events. It also malfunctioned by adding these to chat context...(and not persisting to Google Calendar or Keep.)

Same commands. Different outcomes. It's unusable.

[dimitri-vs]

How would it know you've ran out of milk?

[stavros]

I told it when I noticed. I made a little pendant with a mic I can speak into and it goes to the bot.

[imiric]

Turns out Humane was ahead of its time.

[LeafItAlone]

I would love to hear more about this!

[stavros]

I haven't written it up yet but the repo is here:

It's just a MEMS mic, a battery, and an ESP32, very simple but it works amazingly well. I wrote a companion Android app for it and it works extremely reliably!

[Barbing]

I really love that. Can't wait for your writeup!

[stavros]

The pendant is almost ready, I'll write it up this week!

Sneak peek: https://imgz.org/i6xDDz6x/

[liminal-dev]

Are you running NanoClaw or a different project?

[rekmarks]

He's running his own thing: https://github.com/skorokithakis/stavrobot

[stavros]

Yep, I'm running my own thing (link in sibling), I wanted something secure I could run on my PC.

[brcmthrowaway]

How do people afford this?

[andoando]

Claude max $100 is way more usage than I need. And yeah its not running all the time, just has a heartbeat file telling it how to check something and run

[stavros]

A subscription, really. It doesn't actually run all the time, it just has a cron job that makes it feel that way.

[qudat]

I just tell CC to create a cron job systemd unit