A friend of mine owns _the_ best website by far on how to become a student in Czech Republic. 15 years of effort, hundreds of excellent articles, all the content is regularly updated, etc. Google's ranking for "education in Czech Republic" (in Russian)? Not even in the top 100.
The #1 website in Google's ranking belongs to a company that significantly overcharges future students and has outdated/incorrect information on their website.
I've always wondered why the UK bothers to keep up such a tiny island in the middle of nowhere. Would've been 10x cheaper for the budget to buy the residents 50 houses in Australia and just keep the island as a nature reserve.
If the UK loses Pitcairn, the sun will set on the British Empire. Literally. Without Pitcairn the UK will be entirely in the dark part of the day for the first time in centuries.
This has been done. Pitcairners were relocated to Tahiti (they hated it and all came back to Pitcairn after just 6 months) and then later to Norfolk Island (most of them stayed, but around 40 of them moved back to Pitcairn after a couple years).
Saying "they hated it" when referring to their return from the migration to Tahiti is underselling things a bit. Over a third of them died from sickness having no immunity to things having been isolated so long. The island lifestyle there was completely unlike Tahiti of the past due to the influx of non-Tahitian people, and they basically lived in slums. Luckily they were able to sell copper sheathing from the Bounty to pay for the return journey back to Pitcairn.
I've gotten access to Gemini 1.5 Pro today with a (supposedly) 1M context window and unfortunately in practice it's not good at complicated queries over such a large window, involving multiple recursive lookups back and forth.
The demo is nice but it makes me wonder: why would a company have a fully automated voice line rather than a booking interface? As a customer I'm never happy to call a company to make a reservation. I'd be extra annoyed if an AI picked up and I had to go through the motions of a conversation instead of doing two clicks in a Web UI.
Yes, for booking appointments, a simple interface might do the trick. However, we've seen many excellent use cases of our API that prevent repetitive tasks and help companies save money, like AI logistics assistants, pre-surgery data collection, AI tutor and AI therapists. I believe the future will bring even more voice interface applications. Imagine not having to navigate complex UIs; you could easily book a flight or a hotel just by speaking.
Also, older people might prefer phone calls over navigating UI interfaces.
As a user, I want to talk to LLMs to answer my random day to day questions. I tried the Retell demo and asked it questions that I had earlier asked Alexa and Google Assistant. The Retell experience was a million times better. I wish I could set it as my phone's (Android) default assistant. If you built that, I would pay good money for it!
However, I agree with others. What I don't want to do is talk to LLMs for customer support. For that, I always want to talk to a real person. It would be infuriating for an LLM to pick up when calling a business.
I totally get that clicking in Web UI is super convenient in many scenarios, and I think GUI and voice can co-exist and create synergy. Suppose AI voice agent can solve your problem, cater to your needs, and interact like a human. In that case, I believe it would be super helpful in many scenarios (like others mentioned, waiting on line for 40 minutes is a pretty bad experience). There are also new opportunities in voice like AI companion, AI assistant, etc that we see are starting to emerge.
AWS Perimeter Protection (Firewall service) is hiring.
Full description is here: https://amazon.jobs/en/jobs/2568269/software-development-eng...