Launch HN: Life Bot (YC S17) – Voice app to help with daily activities

Seems sort of like an Echo/Home plus, where you could just get crushed if Amazon starts adding the ability to send texts or something.

Other commenters are right - your differentiators are small and Amazon could implement them with their vast resources in a sprint or two. It's just a guess, but Alexa is probably much larger when it comes to people and money backing it.

You are going to be competing with any platform you run on. It's like you are using Alexa's voice recognition component, but then rebuilding the experience on top of it. Kinda weird.

Most skills extend or compliment the platform. Now I'll have to make sure I use Lifebot instead of Alexa to get a certain feature - its a bad CX if you ask me.

How are you making money? I highly doubt Amazon is paying you to compete with them on core platform functionality.

Also - you have to you give your phone number for the SMS to work. If you have Alexa and enabled communications - it would even be easy for Amazon to implement "Alexa, send that story to Bob" and then it SMS a link to your friend. Do you have their friends contacts too? etc.

If you integrated with IFFTT, or somehow interacted with the first party features to extend them it'd be interesting, but even still then Amazon is only a few weeks away from doing any one of these things.

We do recognise that in a sense we are competing against the native features of the platforms we are running on. But this is always a risk when building on top of platforms. If you take the analogy of mobile - iOS and Android both have native apps for things like notes and reminders - but this doesn't stop 3rd parties creating better versions of them for people that want a bit more in terms of functionality. This is what we're trying to do with Life Bot.

Right now our differentiators may be small, but people are finding them useful and we're working hard to add more based on the feedback we're getting. (Stay tuned!)

Whilst Amazon and Google could have teams sitting there looking out for popular voice apps they could copy features from and implement natively, based on the big pushes they are making to try and bring 3rd party developers to the platform, in my opinion it would be a strange thing for them to do if they just constantly copied the popular ones as native features.

For example the way I see it is that for Amazon, the goal is to get more people shopping through voice. By building an great productivity experience on top of Alexa we're not going against this, in fact we think we'll aid it by the fact more people will want to buy the devices because of the features of Life Bot.

On the invocation --> Having to say "Life Bot" as well as Alexa or Google is additional work for the user, but we think that this is worth it for the enhanced features.

On monetisation --> there are definitely options available to us, for example premium features. But as I'm sure you've seen by testing the product we're still quite early and won't be doing this anytime soon. Amazon are also paying the top skill developers quite significant amounts (https://developer.amazon.com/alexa-skills-kit/rewards) if your a developer looking for a bit of extra $ I would definitely check that out!

On contact sharing --> This is something we don't do currently but are exploring as it's been requested quite a few times.

Hopefully that explains our view on all your points - thanks again for testing out the Skill and sharing such detailed feedback!

Every single successful platform does exactly this. Facebook, Google, Apple.

> On the invocation --> Having to say "Life Bot" as well as Alexa or Google is additional work for the user, but we think that this is worth it for the enhanced features.

As someone who has an Echo Show, an Echo dot, and an original echo, I can tell you that the friction added by having to say the skill name makes me never use it. I can imagine this is the case for a vast majority of non-power users who don't use IFTTT or some other niche skill.

> On monetisation --> there are definitely options available to us, for example premium features. But as I'm sure you've seen by testing the product we're still quite early and won't be doing this anytime soon. Amazon are also paying the top skill developers quite significant amounts (https://developer.amazon.com/alexa-skills-kit/rewards) if your a developer looking for a bit of extra $ I would definitely check that out!

Your payment is based on your ability to keep your replacement experiences better than Amazons and all of their competitors, as well as all of the other skills that can focus on just one of your features and out-sprint you.

Looks like you have a lot of experience building skills and thinking about voice interactions. If I were you - I'd focus on providing something truly unique through voice - something that Apple, Google, or Amazon can't squash you with by sneezing. Even all the stuff covered in your tech crunch article is already done by competitors in some form.

I wish you luck. I don't expect you to find a way to monetize this faster than Google Amazon or Apple will find a way to monetize skills in general, in which case you'll be competing against niche apps for every feature you provide under the life bot umbrella. This will spread you thin. And I would be totally surprised if you raised money on the idea.

Sorry for the hyper critical feedback. Y'all seem super passionate and I want to see more cool voice apps for my Echo. But I can't help but feel many skills developers are simply re-inventing the wheel.