
Life with My Robot Secretary - signor_bosco
http://www.fastcodesign.com/3052646/innovation-by-design/life-with-my-robot-secretary
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Animats
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/](https://www.wildfirevirtualassistant.com/)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildfire_Communications](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildfire_Communications)

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

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

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yggydrasily
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 "AI" claims?

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BoppreH
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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monkmartinez
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 vehicle payment or
the hiring of a part-time employee. Furthermore, can get a human to do this
for $10 an hour or so using a virtual assistant?

If I was super-crazy-busy and making ridiculous $$$, sure. But as a cash flow
restricted mortal with a mortgage a full time job and a side project... $49 in
addition to the myriad of services/equipment I require (accounting, marketing,
materials, equipment maintenance, etc) is not going to happen.

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yummyfajitas
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/](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.

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TimothyGee
How did you find Deepika?

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dsr_
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

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zyxley
> My plan was a free trial that would run $50/mo.

My first thought was "ow", but thinking about it more, that's not a bad price
point to filter out people who think "oh, that's neat" rather than "oh, thank
God, I really need something like that".

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toothbrush
Small nitpick, but i would lose the first GIF which has about 6 emails
scrolling by in quick succession. I'm not a speed-reader, so even managing to
make out the grey summaries at the top took me like 6+ iterations. That's
pretty frustrating, and i only stuck at it because i'm procrastinating and
should actually be doing the dishes, because i should actually be changing a
light bulb, because i should actually be rinsing my yak, because i should
actually be writing my thesis manuscript. In that order.

EDIT: or at least slow it down, because of course the point it's trying to
make is cool and/or worth it and/or noble.

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glossyscr
Some nice PR for Clara, congrats to the Clara team!

I observed this space for some time and came to following conclusion (from an
investment perspective):

\- There are tons of competitors, some of them very well funded such as x.ai

\- Assuming that at some point, let's say 18-24 months the AI of all providers
is near perfection, user should be able to just switch from one provider to
the next one => where is the lock in? Maybe it's learning the user's
preference and behavior?

\- At the moment the AI is damn impressive but at the same time it's easy to
confuse the tech; just bounce some emails back and fourth with "Hey let's meet
today", "Where?", "At the Ritz, 3pm", "Ok", "hey I have to postpone, will come
back to you with a new time", "no problem", "tomorrow is better, same
location, same time, but let's meet directly at the restaurant"; semi-
automatic systems (i think Clara is) which use human operators to do final
checks might deal with such messy conversations but then it's the question
about scaling again

\- You can't include the bots in messenger conversations (minor)

\- Having a real PA is the key to success; the better she knows you the more
she will take of your shoulders. The PA very often acts as a proxy for you and
sometimes it's wise to use this proxy and sometimes not—depending on the other
party and their status. It's perceived as a status symbol and it sends the
signal 'this person is very busy', this is in particular true in a
hierarchical context like in a corporation where only higher levels have
dedicated PAs. It's also common not to approach higher status people (compared
to your own status) with your PA. However, having an AI PA feels just cheap,
like "Hey, I am busy but I can't afford a real PA", this is the main problem,
if you are really important und if you really run a successful business you
NEED to have a ded PA, no AI PA will be able to do the job of a real PA;
important people have two, three dozen meetings a week and just for scheduling
and rescheduling you need a ded PA, less important people have so few meetings
a week that they can schedule them themselves; maybe this perception will
change in 10 years where AI PAs get better and better and everybody has one
but the status issue still stays

Would love to know your opinion? Is this a field to invest?

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HarrietJones
So there used to be a thing called Sandy that did the same sort of thing.

[http://lifehacker.com/321644/sandys-your-personal-
assistant-...](http://lifehacker.com/321644/sandys-your-personal-assistant-
via-email)

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IgorPartola
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.

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dyladan
I think this is probably both caused by, and in order to take advantage of,
personal subconscious bias. Not only do people expect assistants are going to
be female, but actually notice when they're male. It's just another small
facet of the huge gender inequality problem. Worth noting that you can rename
clara if you pay enough and the only competitor that I know of
([https://x.ai/](https://x.ai/)) has male and female options.

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cfontes
That sound really interesting, is it English only? Can it handle tasks
scheduling as well? What I mean by that is:

"Clara, find me a time to do xxx next week"

That integrated with Google inbox (the remind me later feature) would be
great!

P.S: I found it kind of expensive, isn't it?

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cryoshon
Sounds cool. Coordinating schedules and locations is always annoying for me
and I'm super disorganized, so a robot companion would be pretty helpful.

