Are any AI virtual assistants actually useful?
AI Virtual Assistants are on the rise, and logically it seems like I could use one to support productivity, small business, neurodivergent accomodations, etc., BUT, when reviewing what's out there they don't seem super useful.
Otter seems the most useful because it can attend web meetings and record, contextualize screenshares, and sift the transcripts into action items, but it cant go to all webinar services and I'm not sure I can log into this in a corporate platform. Others seem to be able to check a calendar or make a reminder, but nothing I would pay for.
Some use cases might be gathering basic info from clients, scheduling meetings (calendly can handle this), blocking time for my task lists, writing basic email drafts, adding up expenses each month, sending reminders for customers, etc.
All of this could happen with various tools, but seem like good territory for an AI Virtual Assistant.
So, have you found any AI VAs that would be worth paying for? Anything that saves time or makes life easier?
Amazon, Google, and Apple have used mountains of computing resources to churn through endless amounts of (somewhat unethically gathered/processed) data over the course of over a decade just to make a system that I ask to do one of three things:
This was the main cause of the fall from grace for the Alexa team. They sold the program internally as a way to drive sales for themselves and partners through the Skills system, that never happened. Bezos lost faith in the program after shielding it from critique for much too long and so the program is starting to get gutted via layoffs.
There's a really good run down of the entire situation from Insider about this. Even echoing my use case as the majority of what Amazon's internal metrics were showing the team as they struggled to get people to make purchases and order pizza with the device.
I'm not sad that their monetization platform failed but I do lament that as Cortana, Bixby, Siri, and Alexa get dismantled and forgotten over the next decade, those in the vision-impaired community will lose a wonderful accessibility tool along with those of us that will suffer eventual mobility and eyesight issues as we age.
I can't find the articles about it but years back Apple pushed out an iPhone update that redefined the min and max speeds for Siri's speech. The disabled communities that silently grew to rely on chipmunk-on-speed Siri text to speech for ingesting web content caused an overnight uproar, forcing Apple to revert the change so they could continue to get online text fed into their ear at breakneck speeds.
Yeah, this is the big issue with truly supportive technologies being geared toward making money. I said in another reply that i was able to create and add/remove to lists with these devices. You could keeo a GTD system verbally and it was useful, but they want me to order pizza, which I would never do through alexa, so they converted this to shopping lists. It advertises to me endlessly when i ask what's in the news. It makes suggestions on some premium package when i ask it to play sleep sounds. I'm being crushed by ads so i dont have to manually play spotify and set timers!
I was hoping for an actual assistant, who can do things you would pay an assistant to do in a small business, but they are so limited. The alexa skills seemed promising, but they didnt offer the customization I was hoping for (such as listening to audiobooks on apps other than audible).
This is so fascinating to me, because I cannot imagine how they could inhale enough cocaine to think this would be a viable use case in the first place. Even those dash-buttons were better-suited to what they're thinking up here, and those were already a dreadful non-solution in desperate need of a problem.
I use Google Assistant for about 5 things: reminders, timers, quick conversions while cooking, telling me when someone is at the door while I'm out, and text to speech while driving. That's it, and most of the time it works pretty good for these. Shockingly, Google has done a great job at moving reminders into Calendar and making it all work together better. I do miss location-based reminders, but I've gotten used to estimating the time when I'll be home and it works fine enough. They've said that location-based reminders will come back after the move to Calendar, but I'm not going to hold my breath.
Yea how do we define "useful" - I use google for the same, and I have a few google pucks scattered around the house for music too. It's super easy to just tell my house nebulously to set a timer for X minutes or remind me to do something in Y hours, especially when I'm busy with something messy (cooking, wrenching on something in the garage, etc) and don't want to touch my phone.
But I wouldn't say it does all the things I wish it would do; for example, I want to be able to voice control my extensive smart home setup. I did integrate Home Assistant with Google, and it pulled in a lot of things but everything was just disorganized and useless in the google app. I could spend a few hours categorizing and placing everything into rooms in the google app and then I'd unlock the ability to control my smart home things... but I don't want to do that, I already did that in HA.
I have used Alexa in the past and I find its flexibility intriguing but never got into writing my own things for it. I also have tried Siri on my macbook but I never really need to ask her for anything except the odd timer if I'm not near a google spy puck.
It just seems you should be able to do this all with the not creepy version of open source.
YES!! I'm hoping the fediverse catches on and breaks some of this data vampirism so we can have useful things cross platform
I would LOVE to replace them all with 5 or 6 open source ones. Home Assistant has been working on voice stuff, I'm kind of waiting to see how it all develops before I drop money on some experimental random speaker based product (none of them are super cheap that I've seen).
Yeah, I use all of those features as well, and have both google amd alexa devices throughout the house, but they don't do anything I would pay an actual assistant to do in a small business. THAT's what I want! An actual virtual assistant to set appointments for me, find time in my calendar, research things, email people, review notes and documents, etc. Truly time saving things
Yeah. I'm surprised at how underwhelming it all is. I'm giving away gobs of data just so i dont have to click a button. I used to be able to create a lot of lists with it, but they turned those to shopping lists, which i definitely dont need.
I had alexa glasses that could read my email to me while driving to work. That was cool, but I work remotely now so it isnt useful
Same. Well, actually I use Google Assistant for even less. Setting like cooking alarms or morning alarms. Asking about the weather. And telling it to turn on/off the lights around my house. That's it. Every once in a blue moon I'll use Siri to make a reminder for me, but most times I'll just type a reminder in myself. Because most times, Siri can't understand anything.
Don't know if it counts as an AI assistant, but the new Bing AI chat is surprisingly useful to me.
My perception is that Google search results are degrading in usefulness for me, and that's it's increasingly harder to get Google to give me what I need. I end up having to "quote force" most of my terms (because Google unhelpfully does stupid synonym swaps) or use inurl: or site: a lot.
I go into Bing with much lower expectations and have a chat with the robot and then it gives me a small selection of urls, but also wraps those in some context.
I am terrified by the idea of health-related AI though. I think there's potential for us to rush towards that, without properly understanding the risks (AI lies to you, AI leaks data, AI companies have access to data that might surprise users, AI may miss important diagnoses, etc). Eventually it's going to be safe and useful, but I do not trust any of the companies currently working on it to get us there.
You now need to use Tools >
All ResultsVerbatim.I think that generally synonym swaps are a good idea. It gets Google closer to semantic search.
I’m a newcomer to Notion and have recently started having to use it for work. Since I dont use it in daily work, I often forget or have no clue where to find any in buried in the menus. Recently I tried the “AI search field” when I was trying to manually remove links from copy-and-pasted Text from Jira. Surprisingly it was able to remove all of it just by me typing “remove all the links from this text”.
Never thought of this kind of workflow before, but it’s given me a lot of interesting new avenues to explore.
This is more along the use case I'm thinking.
Things like: review my scheduke and find opportunities to free up more time. Review my notes and find themese I can focus on becoming better at. Schedule send emails to x, y, z, etc.
For sure! These very specific highly defined-domain tasks are great with this kind of assistant. Especially for one-offs where you could do it yourself, but remembering exactly how to do it (or writing your own customised workflow to do it) is possibly expensive in terms of time saved vs. just doing it the manual way.
Nice! Maybe I need to look into Notion. I've been using obsidian for note taking and microsoft todo for my task system (probably switching to monday.com. because I have it for other purposes.
I've never used an AI virtual assistant. Mostly because my job and schedule generally don't require them, although they do seem appealing for addressing some tasks.
That said, I use There's an AI for that pretty regularly. Mostly just to get an idea of what new AI tools are being made. Sometimes there's a genuinely good tool listed. Maybe you'll find something useful.
Thanks! I'll check it out!
Thanks!
I haven't seen MS Fabric yet, but it seems like a big deal. One of the biggest challenges around data is finding ways to make it meaningful for busy people who don't typically deal with it, but need to make decisions based on it.
If it can write a decent report, that would be enough for most people.
I use otter daily at work, and it has been absolutely key for catching all details from client call after client call, and being able to go back and reference previous decisions
https://rewind.ai is fascinating and I’m trying that out as well as a subscriber
We’re rapidly approaching a moment where we’ll have a decent local AI augmented with memories of everything we’ve told it, heard, or seen. Rewind.ai gets close. We’re building something similar internally at my company just for our own use that searches all notes, project tickets, and transcripts from a project and provides relevant chunks to an AI when you ask it a question, so it can answer in an informed way and provide links to sources
I think when we have that for our email and texts all local on our phone without going up to the web without privacy implications, that will be the AI moment for consumers.
Hey siri, when’s Jane arriving?
“She said she’s 15min late, so she should be here at 4:30, but you asked me to remind you that she’s always later than she expects, so maybe 5pm”
Hey siri, did I ever get back to dave about the car?
“It doesn’t look like it, his last message asked when you want to bring it in. Want me to respond?”
That’s going to be transformative for a lot of people, and we could do it today on a desktop with a vector database, langchain, and a large local llama model. I have to imagine apple is going full-court press on launching Siri 2.0 by 2024’s wwdc
That's the utopian dream, isn't it? :) They will leverage all that knowledge to hit you with an ad when you are at your weakest. "Would you like me to add pepto bismol to your shopping list?" as it listens to you puking away! :)
What you are describing sounds amazing though, and I think it would truly be a game changer for so many. It really is within the realm of feasibility also, and honestly, I was hoping to see more evolutions toward just that kind of use case!
Here's hoping.