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Forget virtual assistants, Asteria wants to be your AI friend

wareable.com

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Re: Forget virtual assistants, Asteria wants to be your AI friend

#31

Post by nicklaf »

visarga wrote: post #2

A clip on camera you can take with you while jogging or in a museum, and it talks to you? It would be pretty embarrassing to be seen with it. This would work out better in professional settings, such as in a hospital, providing help to doctors.

Perhaps the conspicuousness of wearing and being talked to by such a device is a positive thing. Shocked observers will make negative or bewildered remarks about the proposition, but some who hear about it will be receptive, all without the company taking out a single advertisement.

(Maybe.)

Re: Forget virtual assistants, Asteria wants to be your AI friend

#33

Post by iampims »

neurotech1 wrote: post #30
iampims wrote: post #18

Really curious about how this will pan out as everything said in the article screams at me like someone has no clue how difficult making the device is going to be, regardless of how much ”AI” runs on it. Hardware is really hard.

Not disagreeing that hardware is hard, but IMHO Its possible to get a comparable level of AI/DL performance in the "Asteria" device, using relatively available technology like Zynq FPGA[0] based boards like the Parallella[1]. I got my Parallella board from Kickstarter about 2 years ago. [0] http://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/soc/zynq-7000... [1] http://www.parallella.org/

You're right, the technology is available. But power consumption is another thing altogether. I am assuming the device will be battery powered and the usefulness of some of the sensors, like GPS, drops very quickly if you can't afford to power them on more than a few times a day.

Any wireless radio chip (BLE, Bluetooth, Ant, Wifi), if it needs to be on all the time will also have a huge impact on battery life.

I wish good luck to the Asteria team, and am genuinely curious about how they'll pull it off.

Re: Forget virtual assistants, Asteria wants to be your AI friend

#34

Post by orthoganol »

electic wrote: post #14

I am going to take a step back from the technical merits of this and say the whole thing seems sad. I don't need a need a dog collar on my neck or a badge on my shirt. Lastly, you know life is over when you spend your time talking and hanging out with a AI bot. Our society has become so isolated because people are on Facebook and Instagram instead of talking to each other.

A true AI bot could help you reason through things, teach you about a subject in a way tailored to you, could give you a vision of how you could be doing things differently, it could be a springboard for new ideas on your projects, etc. That would be my vision for the ultimate personal AI app. It's about extending your brain power and even your person. That said I doubt we're even 50 years away from something like that.

Re: Forget virtual assistants, Asteria wants to be your AI friend

#35

Post by pyrophane »

pyrophane wrote: post #12

They are already taking device pre-orders and selling coins for their own cryptocurrency, but I wouldn't give these guys any money right now. Other than blacking out our collective tech-hype bingo board, they've provided very little real information about how they intend to make any of this work. From what they promise I'd expect their team to be stacked with AI researchers, but it looks like just a CEO, a COO and a…

As a thought exercise, here's how a hypothetical scam product (we'll call it Hysteria) could work.

1. Market Hysteria as a revolutionary product in whatever space is currently attracting the most hype. Get everyone excited by promising to bring a popular science fiction book/film to life.

2. Spend half an afternoon cloning bitcoin to create new cryptocurrency linked to your product and start selling the coins. Offer limited time "early mover" price to capitalize on FOMO.

3. Work your press contacts to create more buzz around Hysteria.

4. Once you collected a few million dollars selling coins, go out of business. You haven't really defrauded anyone (you delivered the promised coins, and it isn't your fault they didn't turn out to be worth anything), and in an industry where the mantra is "fail fast" your activity isn't likely to attract that much attention.

Re: Forget virtual assistants, Asteria wants to be your AI friend

#36

Post by RangerScience »

pyrophane wrote: post #12

They are already taking device pre-orders and selling coins for their own cryptocurrency, but I wouldn't give these guys any money right now. Other than blacking out our collective tech-hype bingo board, they've provided very little real information about how they intend to make any of this work. From what they promise I'd expect their team to be stacked with AI researchers, but it looks like just a CEO, a COO and a…

What's this about their own cryptocurrency?

Edit: Found it: https://getasteria.com/currency

Re: Forget virtual assistants, Asteria wants to be your AI friend

#37

Post by RangerScience »

RangerScience wrote: post #36
pyrophane wrote: post #12

They are already taking device pre-orders and selling coins for their own cryptocurrency, but I wouldn't give these guys any money right now. Other than blacking out our collective tech-hype bingo board, they've provided very little real information about how they intend to make any of this work. From what they promise I'd expect their team to be stacked with AI researchers, but it looks like just a CEO, a COO and a…

What's this about their own cryptocurrency? Edit: Found it: https://getasteria.com/currency

It's a bitcoin fork. It looks like they're using it as a form of bond or stock; it's (partly/mostly) pre-mined, they're selling it at a particular rate, and they'll buy it back later when they start making a profit. Interesting!

Anyone know someone else who's trying something similar?

Re: Forget virtual assistants, Asteria wants to be your AI friend

#38

Post by badminton1 »

pyrophane wrote: post #12

They are already taking device pre-orders and selling coins for their own cryptocurrency, but I wouldn't give these guys any money right now. Other than blacking out our collective tech-hype bingo board, they've provided very little real information about how they intend to make any of this work. From what they promise I'd expect their team to be stacked with AI researchers, but it looks like just a CEO, a COO and a…

They are going to take pre-orders and deliver a Nintendogs clone. A Nintendog is an AI friend that fits their vague description.

Re: Forget virtual assistants, Asteria wants to be your AI friend

#39

Post by kuschku »

acobster wrote: post #9
kuschku wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and then the device blurts out some description from Google without using an inside voice. It would sound like an American tourist by doing that. (There’s lots of articles from US expats in europe, or european expats in the EU, showing how US-Americans tend to speak a lot louder than Europeans in quiet settings, from museums to restaurants) This leads to an interesting question: Which culture should a voice assista…

Detecting and adapting to volume isn't that big of a challenge in comparison to natural language processing. But if you mean something more subtle, like discretion or taboo...that's probably much harder than NLP.

Yes, and also adapting to mental concepts of different things.

That starts with phrases, but also applies to other concepts – different cultures have different orientation systems even (some use cardinal directions (north, east, south, west), some use relative directions (front, right, back, left), etc)

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