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Ask HN: What are some of the best user experiences with AI?

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Re: Ask HN: What are some of the best user experiences with AI?

#31

Post by davedx »

codingdave wrote: post #24

When someone pulled right in front of me from a side street a while back while I was driving, the car slammed on the brakes and before I even registered fully what was going on, I found myself stopped safely, but only inches away from having t-boned that guy. That is the level of experience AI needs to get to. Not buttons that basically say: "Use AI!!" but features so fully integrated and smooth that you don't even t…

Not necessarily AI at all. Collision avoidance can work purely based on range finding. Self driving that actually does use AI is all over the place

Re: Ask HN: What are some of the best user experiences with AI?

#32

Post by davedx »

caesil wrote: post #3
spacecadet wrote: post #2

No one? In my opinion we are not there yet. Right now "chat" is the killer UX, I think conversational inputs will take over for a time... right now my killer AI app is a home brew slack bot RAG pipeline for my own knowledge base building and searching... Why share it, its free now... I think this will also be a trend. Those who can, those who cant.

Chat sucks and will be replaced in almost all cases, I suspect. Speaking is much easier for many tasks, traditional UIs for others. Mediating everything through a keyboard is clunky and slow.

Subjective. I much prefer written interactions to spoken

Re: Ask HN: What are some of the best user experiences with AI?

#33

Post by logtempo »

If neural network is AI, then translation tools, deepl being one of my favorite.

There is also AI in video editing apps: fast autofocus on faces, face detection and modifiers that follow you. It's really incredible and intuiive enough so that many people use it (too much maybe).

Re: Ask HN: What are some of the best user experiences with AI?

#34

Post by nucleative »

Klaviyo. I know they have been around a long while but I just implemented it for the first time today on a new ecommerce project.

The signup and setup flow is quite lengthy because they need to implement email flows, abandoned cart reminders, sms flows, push messaging which of course it needs to be highly customized. All of this is needed just to unlock some of the basic features of the tool.

I was surprised and delighted to begin setting up an email series only to discover it had already scanned my website and used AI to write the content of all the messages to be applicable to our tone and messaging.

Highly impressive and it makes getting it up and running super fast.

Re: Ask HN: What are some of the best user experiences with AI?

#35

Post by blowski »

alexpotato wrote: post #30
blowski wrote: post #18

It's difficult to spot, because - similar to your sysadmin - if you know it's AI, it's probably because it's doing a bad job. It's when it just blends into the overall experience so you don't even notice it's there that it's great. There are cases where AI is helping a company be more profitable, by allowing them to provide a substandard service with fewer humans. From a company perspective, it's doing great, but the…

> * Spotify's weekly picks used to be pretty good at recommending new music, although it's actually got worse in the last 2-3 years. In a similar vein, I remember using Pandora for the first time in the late 00's and thinking "Is this software reading my mind??" as it picked song I either already loved or a new song I like immediately. Amazon Music, YouTube etc all feel like it's some version of "this what other peop…

Yes! In 2010, it could say "Oh you like Leonard Cohen? Maybe you'll like Jonathan Richman.", which was a great jump. Now, it's more like "Oh, you like Simon and Garfunkel? Here's a bland cover of one of their songs."

Re: Ask HN: What are some of the best user experiences with AI?

#37

Post by guappa »

codingdave wrote: post #24

When someone pulled right in front of me from a side street a while back while I was driving, the car slammed on the brakes and before I even registered fully what was going on, I found myself stopped safely, but only inches away from having t-boned that guy. That is the level of experience AI needs to get to. Not buttons that basically say: "Use AI!!" but features so fully integrated and smooth that you don't even t…

My car has an alert for collision detection.

It always triggers slightly AFTER I stopped or avoided the collision.

Re: Ask HN: What are some of the best user experiences with AI?

#38

Post by guappa »

caesil wrote: post #3
spacecadet wrote: post #2

No one? In my opinion we are not there yet. Right now "chat" is the killer UX, I think conversational inputs will take over for a time... right now my killer AI app is a home brew slack bot RAG pipeline for my own knowledge base building and searching... Why share it, its free now... I think this will also be a trend. Those who can, those who cant.

Chat sucks and will be replaced in almost all cases, I suspect. Speaking is much easier for many tasks, traditional UIs for others. Mediating everything through a keyboard is clunky and slow.

Speaking is tiring. And generally also slower than typing.

Re: Ask HN: What are some of the best user experiences with AI?

#39

Post by yanis_t »

I was recently working on a UI system that attempts to let AI build websites autonomously. When you start working on it you quickly realize how many tradeoffs you have to think through. Most of the questions arise from the limitedness of the context window. For example, Claude 3 supports 200k tokens.

You also have to take into consideration, that since chat history is sent with every new message, the price of the conversion growths ~ n^2 of the number of messages. So do you send the whole codebase? Or do you let AI run commands like ls and cat to read the files it needs? Do you want a file in the directory with quick history of what's already done, and what needs to be done?

Another thing I find interesting is how microservices became a natural choose vs. monolith apps when building with AI, again due to limits of the context window. So you focus on thinking through all the components and their APIs, and then let AI build each of the component. If it can be done in isolation without any knowledge of other components, that's better.

Also, it quickly becomes obvious that fully-autonoumous builder does not make any practical sense. Real person still needs to look at the progress, and give guidance. Not even because AI can't do this, it probably can. But because your own understand of what you are building changes over time. So it should be semi-automatical, with real users being able to change the course any moment.

How do you build the autonomous loop?

One thing I find useful is to let AI write tests first, and then run those automatically on each new chat message. TypeScript types also helps catching broken code early. In those case automatical message is sent "Hey, you broke the tests. Here are the error messages. Go ahead and fix those." Operator doesn't have to bother, until it's fixed.

Another loop can be build with the ability to send screenshots. So at any moment system can send a screenshot to AI, and ask if it's good enough, and if it wants to make any changes. That also improves the quality.

Well, you get the ides. It's an interesting task to ponder.

Re: Ask HN: What are some of the best user experiences with AI?

#40

Post by rupi »

_bramses wrote: post #17

Gonna drop my own link here, because I really think the UX I’m working on is truly novel. Inspired by the commonplace book format, I take highlights from Kindle and embed them in a DB [1]. From there I build (multiple) downstream apps but the central one, Commonplace Bot [2] is a bot that serves as a retrieval and transformer for said highlights. It has changed the way I read books. I now get to link ideas from books…

I love this. I have my commonplace book in Roam Research. Search in Roam is not perfect and I have wondered lately if there was a way to get all of the content into a graph DB and then query using LLMs. But I haven't had time to tinker with it - I am sure open source libraries exist that do exactly this.

Can your library take all highlights from Readwise or just Kindle? I use Readwise Reader quite a bit and will love something that takes everything I save + all highlights + other places (Roam Research, Email, Calendar) etc. and I can just ask it questions.

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