
Launch HN: Life Bot (YC S17) – Voice app to help with daily activities - MerryOscar
Hey HN!<p>We are Jess and Oscar, the founders of Life Bot, a voice app that helps you complete daily activities.<p>It’s available on Amazon Alexa. To enable, say “Alexa, enable Life Bot” or click on:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;alexa.amazon.com&#x2F;spa&#x2F;index.html#skills&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B0749C8YD5&#x2F;?ref=skill_dsk_skb_sr_0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;alexa.amazon.com&#x2F;spa&#x2F;index.html#skills&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B0749C8YD5...</a><p>Alexa is useful for things like timers, music, and news, but so far, most people don’t bother with Alexa apps. Voice apps are hard to find, they tend to do just one thing, and each has a different name and set of phrasing you need to remember.<p>Life Bot solves this by bringing the most-used features under one voice app. We’ve made the on-boarding process easy and have eliminated the need to visit the Alexa app. We also aren&#x27;t tied to just an echo device, since users aren’t always at home.<p>A popular feature we have is morning news - Life Bot gives your morning headlines through Alexa, but can send the full article to your phone to read up on your commute. Or you can set up a reminder to
pick up milk through Alexa, and have it sent to you by text at 5pm the next day. SMS reminders are our most popular feature!<p>Oscar and I first started working with Alexa in 2015. We set up Europe’s first &quot;voice design agency&quot; to build Alexa Skills for large brands. We experienced first hand the problems of discoverability, setup, and usability with Skills, and saw a huge opportunity to create the first voice app that people love.<p>Long term, our aim for Life Bot is that it becomes the only voice app you need – providing a consistent experience across all voice platforms and devices.<p>We’re excited about voice as a new tech interface and are convinced of the trend in voice. In our view, it won’t be long before voice interfaces will become the first port of call over a phone.<p>We’d love to hear your feedback on the Life Bot voice app, and looking forward to discussing anything voice related!<p>We’d also love to know, what do you wish Alexa could do that it can’t already?
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alttab
I installed it. Its cool. However, it competes with first class features that
are provided by the platform you are running on. Any successful voice platform
will also have these features you will need to compete against.

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.

~~~
MerryOscar
Thanks for the detailed comments!

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](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!

~~~
alttab
> 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.

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](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.

------
Yertis
This is an interesting play in the voice space...kind of reminds me of the
role Dropbox has played in online storage vs GOOG, MSFT, AAPL, AMZN, etc. By
being platform agnostic, users can get a unified and better experience across
their devices.

Right now voice is cool, but to me it's a little bit of a gimmicky feature
that acts differently across devices from different ecosystems. It makes it
that much harder to universally change my behavior toward voice across the
different devices I use. I can see how Life Bot could change that.

Have you guys thought about the ecosystem dynamics for Life Bot? Do you think
the big players will play nice if you start to own the voice relationship with
the user, instead of AMZN/GOOG/MSFT/AAPL?

~~~
JessOpearlo
hey! thanks so much for your comment. That last point is a good one - the way
we see it is that the big players have to be nice - because there is so much
competition between them - it would dis-encourage the developer community from
dedicating time to building amazing voice experiences if they started making
the platform less open or blocking certain features. So far we've worked
really closely with the Alexa and the Google team when developing Life Bot and
both have been really supportive and helpful.

------
peacetreefrog
I sort of get the cross device thing, but who owns, uses and switches between
multiple voice assistant devices?

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.

~~~
MerryOscar
Right now your right probably not many people, but as digital assistants get
integrated into more and more devices this will become a problem for a lot of
people!

Agree Amazon could just add SMS to their reminders - but we're working on a
whole lot more features that we think can be Echo / Home + as you say!

------
kayhi
"Life Bot solves this by bringing the most-used features under one voice app."

The most used features are able to be asked to Alexa directly.

Are you helping users that may not want to set up IFTTT triggers for actions?

~~~
MerryOscar
You're right that Alexa does a lot of these features natively, but what we're
trying to do is make each one better for users.

For example with reminders, we allow users to get notified of the reminders
they set where ever they are via SMS. Or for news we give users the option of
texting the full article to their phone.

Right now we're starting with simple productivity features, but going forward
we want to make it easier for Alexa users to interact with other third party
services without having to enable a whole bunch of different Skills.

IFTTT is a great service but a lot of Alexa users aren't familiar with it.

~~~
colecut
"For example with reminders, we allow users to get notified of the reminders
they set where ever they are via SMS."

This was my #1 most desired feature!! Thank you

~~~
MerryOscar
No worries! Great to hear!! :)

If there's anything else you'd like to see added just let me know at
om@asklifebot.com

------
skoocda
Do you have a website? Am interested to learn more but I don't have any Alexa-
enabled devices, so I can't really use your link.

~~~
MerryOscar
Yes you can find more info at
[http://www.asklifebot.com](http://www.asklifebot.com)

Right now we're just on Alexa but will be coming to other platforms very soon!

~~~
pashabitz
wrong twitter link on your home page

~~~
MerryOscar
Thanks!! :) - updated!

------
JessOpearlo
Hey everyone I'm Jess the other cofounder of Life Bot thanks for all your
comments so far

------
rememberlenny
The Life Bot has been really great and responsive around their private
Facebook group.

They shared that they will be opening up a developer friendly API to allow
easy integrations with Alexa.

Im looking forward to this.

~~~
MerryOscar
Thanks!

We're working on ways for developers to enhance Life Bot - stay tuned! :)

------
rrggrr
IFTT (www.iftt.com) will also provide SMS reminders through Alexa.

~~~
JessOpearlo
hey! thanks for your comment. We recognise that IFTT can do reminders, but our
aim with Life Bot is to hide as much of the setup process as possible from our
users. For example the set up process is really easy with Life Bot. On 1st
time use, we ask for their phone number which they speak, then we text them
asking for their name and email. The next time they open the skill we confirm
their time zone and then they are ready to go with the reminders feature.

------
mindhash
Hey .. see a good monetization strategy will be hyper local shopping.. give
something for local players to compete with Amazon..

------
infinitone
I'm still confused at what voice app is. And the link takes me a to a login
page- there's you first problem in terms of discover-ability...

~~~
MerryOscar
Thanks - agree discoverability is an issue on Alexa! If you have an Alexa
device just say "Alexa, enabled Life Bot". Or you can enable directly from
amazon.com at this link:

[https://www.amazon.com/www-asklifebot-com-Life-
Bot/dp/B0749C...](https://www.amazon.com/www-asklifebot-com-Life-
Bot/dp/B0749C8YD5)

------
brod_ie
Sounds cool, I don't have an Echo though. When can I get this on my other
devices?

~~~
JessOpearlo
Hey! thanks for your comment. We're launching on Google Assistant in a couple
of weeks so watch out for that. After that we'll launch on Cortana as well. We
keep everyone updated on our fb group about new releases if you wanted to join
:)
[https://www.facebook.com/groups/lifebot/](https://www.facebook.com/groups/lifebot/)

~~~
brod_ie
Joined! Looking forward to trying this out, thanks

------
isawczuk
What was your uniq selling point for YC?

~~~
mindhash
I think yc is looking more towards founders than problems being solved.. Makes
sense too for early stage ventures..

------
asdfgadsfgasfdg
Why? What problem is this solving?

~~~
MerryOscar
Right now, the biggest problem Life Bot solves for Alexa users is that we
bring voice reminders out of the home - If you set a reminder using Alexa,
it's only useful if you're around the device to hear it go off. Life Bot sends
you your reminder via SMS so where ever you are you'll get it!

As we add more productivity features to Life Bot, we're also removing the need
for user's to remember multiple invocation names for different skills.

Finally in the future we see people having to use multiple voice assistants
during their day. You might have an Amazon Echo at home, but an Android phone
with Google Assistant on it, and maybe even Cortana in your car. Life Bot will
be on all platforms which will give you a consistent experience across all of
them.

~~~
asdfgadsfgasfdg
Cross platform is a selling point for me at least.

Will you integrate with standard calendar technology? E.g. caldav etc?

I'm still not convinced that voice is a platform - it seems like more of a
feature to me...

~~~
MerryOscar
Yes calendar integration will be included in the next release - we're going to
start with Google Calendar but will add more of the most popular calendar
services as we go.

I'm not 100% familiar with caldav but will look into it!

In terms of voice as a feature vs. platform - I think right now it appears to
many to be a feature, because the quality and capability of voice apps is just
not that great. Most voice apps offer a sub-set of the functionality available
on mobile or web, so from a phycological point of view when you use one it
feels like just a small (and often not as good) feature of the main product.
However as the accuracy of the underlying speech to text and natural language
understanding of these platforms gets better, and as the capability of voice
apps gets better, we see voice becoming a much more easy and natural way for
people to access their favourite products, services, and content.

Whenever you want something, you'll just ask your assistant, and because you
may be using multiple platforms, we think Life Bot will be the best way to do
this that maintains the context of what you like / don't like.

Definitely still early days though - but that's the vision!

------
vonwong
Cool! Installed :D

~~~
MerryOscar
Awesome! Would love to hear your feedback!!

