Comment by stavros
3 days ago
They're "always" running, so they can notify you out of the blue, without you having to initiate a conversation. It's really nice UX to get a message from my assistant saying "hey, it's time to leave for the gym, and don't forget the supermarket bag because you're picking up milk on the way back, as you've run out".
Dunno, my calendar reminds me "out of the blue", without me having to initiate a conversation, that it's time to leave for the gym, no "claw" or "ai" involved.
I always have my backpack with me, so if I need milk I can pick it up on the way back. And I am pretty sure that I have to notice if I need milk myself.
The tech sounds cool, but whenever I hear about actual applications, I don't see the point.
That's because you just lack of imagination. Imagine if you have a human personal assistant, what would you ask them to do? Examples:
"Find me the cheapest ticket to Las Vegas for the first week of June. Buy one at anytime that you think is reasonable. Wait until no later than two months from now before buying. Get two tickets if my brother can also go".
"Email me if anyone posts a Sega multi mega for sale. But only if it's in black color".
I have no idea if OpenClaws can already do such a task or not, I don't have one, but it opens up new possibilities. If it isn't there yet, it will be.
> Imagine if you have a human personal assistant, what would you ask them to do?
That’s kind of the confusing thing for me, I wouldn’t have a human personal assistant do anything for me as long as any money is on the line. I couldn’t teach them my preferences well enough to trust them to do it the way I want, instead of just doing it myself.
Personal assistants only make sense to me if you’re so rich that money doesn’t really matter to you anyways.
Your trip booking thing for example is something I would never give to a human assistant.
The alert for stuff on sale can already be done on the usual price tracking websites.
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Thank you for illustrating my point perfectly: none of these scenarios you give as examples are things that resonate with me at all, and I wouldn't delegate them to a human personal assistant either.
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> Imagine if you have a human personal assistant, what would you ask them to do?
Those are not good examples for why people have a human assistant, you have human assistants to do in-person or person-to-person things that you don't have the time or desire to do yourself. They are simply not the same as releasing a 24/7 ai roulette process on the internet with all your payment and account info.
The online monitoring examples can be done with current automation tools and scripts
If I had a human personal assistant, I'd tell him to clean my gutters, sweep the driveway, clean the kitchen table...
I understand, if we imagine a world where everyone is constantly plugged into the computer all the time, and every bit of human activity is coordinated and surveilled by the computer at all times, this shit appears to be quite useful. Otherwise and even if, it's total schlock.
Like, "hey openclaw can you order me groceries" is great, but the only reason is that there's a wageslave on the other side of that transaction who has to drive to the grocery storef and pick the groceries out. Pretty soon that slave is going to be all of us and my god it makes me feel like an insane person that the boosters of this tech don't see that.
Good luck ever getting this to work when airlines still refuse to publish APIs and captcha anything that looks automated.
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If you don't have a need for a personal assistant, that's fine, not everyone does. That doesn't mean nobody does.
The milk thing was just an example of a tool that can intelligently combine things for you, not a literal "it's a calendar with a milk function".
This is a bit like "if I want to call my friends, I have a phone a home, why would I need a mobile?" which somewhat betrays a lack of imagination.
You're just not providing any good examples of what I cant already do with current automation tools.
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Everything I’ve seen about it feels so over engineered
Hmm, Google Gemini has access to my Google Tasks and can set reminders. It's also asked me if I want it to check something at "tomorrow 9am", and when I said yes, it managed to do that.
Yeah, that's kind of like it. Agents just have many many more integrations, so they can do many more things. For example, it knows all my preferences, and can search for flights and say things like "this one is more expensive, but skipping the morning wakeup is worth the $20".
But have you had consistently good experience with Google Gemini and Google apps? Or read the mixed reviews?
For me, Gemini has been hit or miss and somehow less useful than Assistant was 2+ years ago.
The coding assistant for VSCode is nuts (i.e. gets it wrong a lot, also one time it just got so confused).
I have Gemini Pro for free for a year because I bought a Pixel phone, it answers very fast, so I like it. Let's see how I'll feel about shelling out real money when the subscription ends. But on the phone, I still use Assistant (and just have a shortcut to launch the webpage in my browser), because the phone was forcing Gemini, but after 5 minutes of usage I found it was slower for my usages (usually I just tell it to set an alarm and add a reminder/calendar event), and when I asked about my tasks, Gemini would get the task listing from Google Tasks, and keep it in its history... that'll pollute my chat history!
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How would it know you've ran out of milk?
I told it when I noticed. I made a little pendant with a mic I can speak into and it goes to the bot.
Turns out Humane was ahead of its time.
I would love to hear more about this!
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How do people afford this?
Claude max $100 is way more usage than I need. And yeah its not running all the time, just has a heartbeat file telling it how to check something and run
A subscription, really. It doesn't actually run all the time, it just has a cron job that makes it feel that way.
I just tell CC to create a cron job systemd unit