Every service is being sold at a deep discount chasing market share, but it's not lasting forever.

Speaking only personally of course, I'm completely over the chat idiom in almost every way. Where is all this future demand coming from? By the time Android lands a God mode ultimate voice assistant it's pretty much guaranteed I will be well beyond the point where I'd want to use it. The whole thing is starting to remind me of 3G video calling where the networks thought it'd change everything, and by the end of it with all the infrastructure in place, the average user has made something like 0.001 3G-native video calls over the lifetime of their usage.

Would really love some path forward where the AI parts only poke out as single fields in traditional user interfaces and we can forget this whole episode

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colechristensen 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't understand this perspective. I can't imaging a point where I won't want to ask "what's the weather like?" "please turn off the lights" "what is the airspeed of an unladen swallow?" likewise chatting through directing it to build something or solve a problem, voice or typing will each have their place.

And video calling did take off, plenty of people use facetime and almost everybody working in an office uses some form of video calls. Criticizing the early attempts at getting video calling working because they hadn't taken off yet (I remember them being advertised on "video phones" with 56k modems), of course someone was going to have the idea and implement before it was quite reasonable.

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neonstatic 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> I can't imaging a point where I won't want to ask "what's the weather like?" "please turn off the lights"

To help with understanding that perspective, I cannot imagine a scenario where I would ask a device connected to the internet to turn off the lights. I literally never wanted this. A physical switch is a 100% non negotiable for me. I feel the same way about non-mechanical car doors.

Perhaps due to that outlook I was always puzzled about the entire idea of an "assistant". It's interesting for me to see, that there are people out there who actually want that "assistant".

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wat10000 3 hours ago | parent [-]

You don't watch Iron Man and want a JARVIS? Current systems are pretty far away from that, but that's the overall draw.

	▲	neonstatic 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don't watch superhero stuff. But even with a more classical example of Space Odyssey 2001 - a talking computer has never been something I found even remotely interesting. It took me months to give LLMs a serious try due to this.