The privacy issue blocks me from adopting this or other personal assistants: do I want to give muse my identity data and access to my mail, calendar, and phone so it can do even basic tasks like make appointments or pay bills?
It will be interesting to see if muse's privacy features can get users over this.
Meta's active user base doesn't care about privacy.
Most personal tasks take trivial amounts of time these days. Does a 5th grade teacher or an auto mechanic need a personal assistant? Do we need to be able to book a trip faster? It feels very gimmicky to me, but I realize I'm not their target audience.
Given that, I do think Meta will probably get the lions share of B2C AI and they have a proven track record of using personal data to serve ads and make a lot of profit. If they capture more of their user base's time, it keeps them engaged and away from a list of competitors. If Meta starts crushing it in this fashion I could see IPO's of OpenAI and Anthropic land like fart in church.
I mean I just used muse to plan out my entire weekend trip to Vegas recently. I booked everything myself but I asked it to shortlist dining options for me given dietary restrictions, events given restrictions (with elderly family), etc. it basically handled all the stuff I would have normally just Google searched for. Plus it made a nice web app dashboard to display it all. It seems pretty useful for common use.
It also handled payment splitting. I told it what person x spent for the group split 3 ways (it originally split by the total number of people, but I clarified that only me + x + y are paying) and it kept running totals. When I got an email from Venmo saying x sent me money, muse automatically updated the balance sheet.
We saw some signs written in an unfamiliar language. Muse told me what language it was.
I think some of those tasks are part of the fun of a trip - doing the research on locations, events, restaurants, etc. You stumble through a bunch of things and little nuggets of that sit in your brain and then when you're on the trip they might come up - one place is abruptly closed, something looks like a bummer in person, etc. Without doing that research yourself then on the trip you have a list of things and aren't really knowledgable about alternatives.
Like I said, I'm not the target audience for a personal assistant. That does sound like a more ideal UX than what chat gippity and the others offer though. I would expect that with Meta - they really get the UX mostly right for people.
Sure, I get that. For this particular case, I've been to Vegas (family lives there) "plenty" so I don't really care much about stumbling upon stuff like you pointed out. I just wanted to have some places on hand to suggest for dinner and things to do when the group when we'd inevitably get to the "so can someone decide what are we doing for dinner???" part of the day. For planning a long trip to say Tokyo (never been) for vacation I'd do the regular stuff searching Google and reading blogs, but I'd also add AI search to it, if anything to find the current new "viral/trendy" stuff that I absolutely do not keep up with.
egl2020 · · focus · HN ↗
It will be interesting to see if muse's privacy features can get users over this.
mattbrewsbytes · · focus · HN ↗
Most personal tasks take trivial amounts of time these days. Does a 5th grade teacher or an auto mechanic need a personal assistant? Do we need to be able to book a trip faster? It feels very gimmicky to me, but I realize I'm not their target audience.
Given that, I do think Meta will probably get the lions share of B2C AI and they have a proven track record of using personal data to serve ads and make a lot of profit. If they capture more of their user base's time, it keeps them engaged and away from a list of competitors. If Meta starts crushing it in this fashion I could see IPO's of OpenAI and Anthropic land like fart in church.
rolosa · · focus · HN ↗
It also handled payment splitting. I told it what person x spent for the group split 3 ways (it originally split by the total number of people, but I clarified that only me + x + y are paying) and it kept running totals. When I got an email from Venmo saying x sent me money, muse automatically updated the balance sheet.
We saw some signs written in an unfamiliar language. Muse told me what language it was.
mattbrewsbytes · · focus · HN ↗
Like I said, I'm not the target audience for a personal assistant. That does sound like a more ideal UX than what chat gippity and the others offer though. I would expect that with Meta - they really get the UX mostly right for people.
rolosa · · focus · HN ↗