Forget virtual assistants, Asteria wants to be your AI friend
1–10 of 63 posts
Re: Forget virtual assistants, Asteria wants to be your AI friend
#2A 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.
Re: Forget virtual assistants, Asteria wants to be your AI friend
#3A 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.
I think it depends on the interaction. If it behaves more like a toy than a tool, I could see it being kind of embarrassing. Then again, imagine just how annoying it would be to have people walking around in a museum saying "Asteria, tell me about this painting." and then the device blurts out some description from Google without using an inside voice.
Re: Forget virtual assistants, Asteria wants to be your AI friend
#4Reminds me of the movie Her....
Re: Forget virtual assistants, Asteria wants to be your AI friend
#5A 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.
I think it depends on the interaction. If it behaves more like a toy than a tool, I could see it being kind of embarrassing. Then again, imagine just how annoying it would be to have people walking around in a museum saying "Asteria, tell me about this painting." and then the device blurts out some description from Google without using an inside voice.
> 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 assistant follow? Should there be multiple variants of each assistant?
Re: Forget virtual assistants, Asteria wants to be your AI friend
#6A 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.
I think it depends on the interaction. If it behaves more like a toy than a tool, I could see it being kind of embarrassing. Then again, imagine just how annoying it would be to have people walking around in a museum saying "Asteria, tell me about this painting." and then the device blurts out some description from Google without using an inside voice.
The idea would be that the Asteria device learns to interact with you in social norms, like how you would act. And with that, some locations are better than others, but it really evolves to converse with you in your daily life, to help fill your needs.
Re: Forget virtual assistants, Asteria wants to be your AI friend
#7> Eventually they're predicting. Then you can do things like ambient intelligence where you can provide services and you can provide products or experiences to people before they know they need it.
So, it's your friend...but it's also there to sell you stuff. But just think of it as your friend.
It sounds like they don't quite know what they're selling or how it's going to be useful to people (which they kinda admit). I could see getting utility from a VA that also suggests services for specific needs, but a friendship with "ambient intelligence" behind it figuring out how it's going to chum up its next product placement? If it's really a "true AI" why not sell it on that merit alone?
Re: Forget virtual assistants, Asteria wants to be your AI friend
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it depends on the interaction. If it behaves more like a toy than a tool, I could see it being kind of embarrassing. Then again, imagine just how annoying it would be to have people walking around in a museum saying "Asteria, tell me about this painting." and then the device blurts out some description from Google without using an inside voice.
The idea would be that the Asteria device learns to interact with you in social norms, like how you would act. And with that, some locations are better than others, but it really evolves to converse with you in your daily life, to help fill your needs.
This is your startup, I'm not sure why you're speaking in the hypothetical "would be." You either know what your product does, or it doesn't.
Re: Forget virtual assistants, Asteria wants to be your AI friend
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it depends on the interaction. If it behaves more like a toy than a tool, I could see it being kind of embarrassing. Then again, imagine just how annoying it would be to have people walking around in a museum saying "Asteria, tell me about this painting." and then the device blurts out some description from Google without using an inside voice.
> 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.
Re: Forget virtual assistants, Asteria wants to be your AI friend
#10I heartily recommend Kill Process (2016) by William Hertling, where a startup trying to bootstrap a social network uses AI to avoid empty network problem. The novel describes the version of this "done right" pretty well.
Right now, you can find the version of this "done wrong" in "dating site" populated by chatbots.