The great thing about a product like this is that it's so easy to fake it in video.

I don't really buy that typing speed is a bottleneck for most people. We can't actually think all that fast. And I suspect AI is doing a lot of filling in the gaps here.

It might have some niche use cases, like being able to use your phone while cycling.

I fear that if AI filling the gapsis competing with your own thoughts while using it, your lazy brain goes the easy way and accepts the insinuations of themachine as its own. Beating the entire purpose of having a gizmo that writes down "your very own" thoughts.

That is if this exists. But if it does, it's not what you think it does for you.

Personal anecdote: I do find typing to be a bottleneck in situations where typing speed is valuable (so notes in meetings, not when coding).

I can break 100wpm, especially if I accept typos. It's still much, much slower to type than I can think.

It's possible the demo is faked, and I'm skeptical. But I also don't think the speed is really the point of a device like this. Getting out a device, pressing keys or tapping on it, and putting it away again, those attentional costs of using some device... I know something like basic notetaking would feel really different to me if I was able to just do the thing in the demo at high accuracy instead. That's a big if, though - the accuracy would have to be high for it to really be useful, and the video is probably best-case clips.

Typing speed is very much a bottleneck when I'm washing dishes, at least.

learn more on: https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/alterego/overview/

also adding their press release here:

https://docsend.com/view/dmda8mqzhcvqrkrk/d/fjr4nnmzf9jnjzgw

I think the idea here is a very different mode of programming. Less prompting, waiting, seeing results, prompting again (where typing is not the bottleneck)

But more having a conversation with a really fast coding agent. That should feel like you’re micro-managing an intern as they code really fast, you could start describing the problem and it could start coding and you interject and tell it to do do things differently. There the bottleneck would be typing, especially if you have fast inference. But with voice now you’re coding at the speed of your thoughts.

I think doing that would be super cool but awkward if you’re talking out loud in an office, that’s where this device would come in.

Pulling out my phone, unlocking it, opening my notes app, creating a new note, that is a bottleneck.

Puling out my phone, unlocking it, remembering what the hotkey is today for starting google/gemini, is a bottle neck. Damned if I can remember what random gesture lets me ask Gemini to take a note today (presumably gemini has notes support now, IIRC the original release didn't).

Finding where Google stashes todo items at, also a bottle neck. Of course that entails me getting my phone out and navigating to whatever notes app (for awhile todos/notes were inside a separate Google search app!) they are shoved into.

My Palm Pilot from 2000 had more usability than a modern smartphone.

This device can solve all of those issues.

Most people i think type very slowly on computers and i believe type even more slowly on phones. I've had many many people remark at how fast i type on both of those platforms and it still confuses me, as i think it's so easy for me to overlook how slowly people type.

I agree that it's an easy to fake demo and at the same time, if they're going to fake it, why make it seem so slow?

As to whether typing speed is a bottleneck for most people, maybe not most people, but definitely some people, and it's a massive bottleneck for me personally.

I think better when I'm talking and since I have started using speech to text, it has increased my writing speed and coding speed by at least an order, maybe two orders of magnitude.

But you are right, the AI filling in gaps can really cause trouble using speech, goodness knows what it's doing using sub-speech.

> We can't actually think all that fast.

One of the major ways you can speed up reading, is that you stop 'vocalizing' each word in your head. It does seem that thinking is much faster than 'thinking aloud' (in your head)

Plausible deniability is the ticket. I see the killer app here being communication with people in comas. Or corpses.

> while cycling

depends on what they are connected to in the back there.

Typing is a big bottleneck. Speak for yourself