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Life with My Robot Secretary

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Re: Life with My Robot Secretary

#21
Wildfire was doing much of this twenty years ago.[1][2] Listen to their demo. That system was way ahead of its time. It was quite popular, but compute intensive enough that the service was expensive. At its peak, Wildfire was a standard offering on Orange cellular service in the UK, but they dropped it in 2005. Somewhere in the 2000s, Microsoft bought the technology and trashed the product, although Cortana is to some extent a successor. Now a small startup has the original technology, and offers it, at an excessive price.

One key to doing this is that the system must consistently respond to the user in about 200-300ms. Long delays, as with Google voice dialing, are unacceptable. That was why it was so expensive in the 1990s; the company had to provision a lot of server capacity per user. Today, it ought to be much cheaper.

$49 a month reflects what Wildfire cost in the 1990s. Today, it should cost about $2/month.

[1] https://www.wildfirevirtualassistant.com/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildfire_Communications

Re: Life with My Robot Secretary

#22

This looks awesome. I use reminders in Inbox with reckless abandon, love them. Please tell me there is an open source version of this or that I am missing something in gmail to do this. Pretty please. That said: There is no way I am spending $49 a month on this. There is a point where you have to analyze how many $5/$10/$15 dollar a month subscriptions you have. Pretty soon it can escalate to the cost of a monthly ve…

An intelligent assistant is fantastically useful. I sometimes pay $50/month (depending on how much work she does) and she is worth every penny.

E.g., "Deepika, call up brokers and schedule me apartment viewings in $X location for $Y or less, schedule these appointments on monday evening back to back. Do the same for $Z location on tuesday evening."

Of course, Deepika (name changed a little) is actually a real girl; I can only afford her because her choice of birth country allows me to pay less than US minimum wage.

In my experience these robot assistance are not as smart as Deepika. Scheduling in particular is a use case designed to make the user feel important rather than actually save people time. Doodle ( http://doodle.com/ ) substitutes UI for AI, but it works brilliantly. Every email bot I've been the victim of just fobs work off from the user to their counterparty.

Re: Life with My Robot Secretary

#23

So there used to be a thing called Sandy that did the same sort of thing. http://lifehacker.com/321644/sandys-your-personal-assistant-...

I used that! The best thing was that it was free IIRC. Also, does anyone else find it weird that all these personal assistants are created with a female persona? Just wondering if there is a broader thing here.

I am bothered by this - it's a completely unnecessary reinforcement of a stereotype. I don't understand why an androgynous name (eg Alex) or a neutral name (R2D2) is not an option, if the software is not up to recognising two different appellations.

And it can create a cognitive dissonance if you allow people to modify half-assedly - eg. it annoys me that I have to ask Siri for help when I have set Siri to be an Australian male voice.

Re: Life with My Robot Secretary

#24

This looks awesome. I use reminders in Inbox with reckless abandon, love them. Please tell me there is an open source version of this or that I am missing something in gmail to do this. Pretty please. That said: There is no way I am spending $49 a month on this. There is a point where you have to analyze how many $5/$10/$15 dollar a month subscriptions you have. Pretty soon it can escalate to the cost of a monthly ve…

An intelligent assistant is fantastically useful. I sometimes pay $50/month (depending on how much work she does) and she is worth every penny. E.g., "Deepika, call up brokers and schedule me apartment viewings in $X location for $Y or less, schedule these appointments on monday evening back to back. Do the same for $Z location on tuesday evening." Of course, Deepika (name changed a little) is actually a real girl; I…

How did you find Deepika?

Re: Life with My Robot Secretary

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An intelligent assistant is fantastically useful. I sometimes pay $50/month (depending on how much work she does) and she is worth every penny. E.g., "Deepika, call up brokers and schedule me apartment viewings in $X location for $Y or less, schedule these appointments on monday evening back to back. Do the same for $Z location on tuesday evening." Of course, Deepika (name changed a little) is actually a real girl; I…

How did you find Deepika?

I'm not the OP -- the term to google is VA, virtual assistant. It is, currently, something of a boom industry. One of my friends does it: marywuva.com

Re: Life with My Robot Secretary

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An intelligent assistant is fantastically useful. I sometimes pay $50/month (depending on how much work she does) and she is worth every penny. E.g., "Deepika, call up brokers and schedule me apartment viewings in $X location for $Y or less, schedule these appointments on monday evening back to back. Do the same for $Z location on tuesday evening." Of course, Deepika (name changed a little) is actually a real girl; I…

How did you find Deepika?

She's a former coworker. Sometimes I live in India.

Re: Life with My Robot Secretary

#27
post #10

Meekan is the only one of these that's 100% AI with no human operators (and it's free) http://meekan.com/slack

Include a disclaimer about you being the co-founder of meekan.com

All the details are in my profile, but true, I should mention that I'm a co-founder at Meekan

Re: Life with My Robot Secretary

#28
post #6

This looks awesome. I use reminders in Inbox with reckless abandon, love them. Please tell me there is an open source version of this or that I am missing something in gmail to do this. Pretty please. That said: There is no way I am spending $49 a month on this. There is a point where you have to analyze how many $5/$10/$15 dollar a month subscriptions you have. Pretty soon it can escalate to the cost of a monthly ve…

> There is no way I am spending $49 a month on this. You're not the target market then. For that matter, neither am I. The target market is people who need an admin assistant, but can't pay the five figures per year yet.

I see your point.

However, the price is still steep considering what leading virtual assistant service companies charge. The bonus with a virtual assistant is the "on demand" aspect. Its not a fixed cost per month, every month. When I am really busy, I use it more and consequently pay more and vice versa for when times are slow...

Re: Life with My Robot Secretary

#29
post #18
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no way I am spending $49 a month on this. You're not the target market then. For that matter, neither am I. The target market is people who need an admin assistant, but can't pay the five figures per year yet.

I'd wager the largest market for this service is b2b companies of all sizes. Hand this to the entire sales team. Sit back and watch the money roll in.

Or pay for VA's that can do a LOT more for close to the same price?

Re: Life with My Robot Secretary

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Include a disclaimer about you being the co-founder of meekan.com

So lemme get this straight: it's okay for someone to post this advertisement-disguised-as-an-article about a YC-backed company's product that doesn't even do what it claims to do (the "article" reveals at the end that there are an "unspecified" number of human beings actually doing things behind the scenes in Clara), but not for someone to post about a competing product that actually does live up to the over-hyped "A…

Unless noted, I assume posts come from companies and comments from individuals. This has large impacts in trustworthiness and skepticism level.

I believe my position is common, and why undisclosed company comments are frowned upon.

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