Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by weitendorf 23 days ago
If you’re serious about this, let me know!

This is something I built for myself, and to experiment with inference stacks. You can obviously just transcribe audio and hand it off to frontier models, so all you really need is a good voice stack and a “driver” for the interaction (like a phone call, place to see their work).

There are two big problems with this space IMO. One isn’t that you can’t get this to work but that people generally aren’t willing to pay for it for themselves, rather as a way to screen or automate stuff to be used by other people. Did you know Claude Code has a voice mode and that openai launched whisper a year ago, both of which have positive sentiment and adoption in heavy ai tool users? Yet it’s a blip in their marketing or why people use their products, meanwhile outside of coding, most of the biggest and highest earning AI product companies so far are voice agents targeting customer service, sales, business processes, etc.

The second is related: voice is genuinely a low-bandwidth medium, so as a primary interface for interacting with AI there is not a lot you can get out of it compared to eg complex technical work or visualizations or interactive applications. It is physically and mentally demanding to speak-aloud a highly detailed prompt fast enough that VAD won’t cut you off and you have something with comparable information density or specificity vs text. But to keep up a shorter and more natural cadence you’ll not be able to wait on a lot of thinking/tool unless you play UI tricks (ums and fillers, two models in a trench coat), break the illusion of a single coherent conversation, or take a lot of long pauses.

That’s why for the supplementary coding use case it’s mostly used for remote steering, and for general use marketed towards the large and very not-online group of people for whom typing is not a natural or common thing for them to spend their time on. Now that so much spend goes through heavily used token subscriptions and they’ve proven that kind of product, they’re not marketing “tool to get the most tokens per $ running your subscription 24/7” anymore lol.

What I’m most interested in is true “ambient” tool use against my own data or work, and for-later (or pushed live via your phone) visualizations or “five models in a trench coat but still coherent” UX, which you probably are too. But I think unless you work a lot with AI tools already it’s hard to understand how that’s any different from asking Alexa to set a timer, and either way something you’re not so desperate to have that you go looking for it, or pay smaller vendors/set up yourself.