Comment by mpweiher
5 days ago
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.
> I wouldn’t have a human personal assistant do anything for me as long as any money is on the line.
You don’t have to trust them with money. You can ask them to send you the info for you to do the final step.
> Your trip booking thing for example is something I would never give to a human assistant.
Maybe not you, but people already use personal travel agency for their booking need, see for example:
https://www.reddit.com/r/travelagents/comments/1i4fiod/best_...
Air ticket booking agency used to be popular before the Internet made that business obsolete.
> The alert for stuff on sale can already be done on the usual price tracking websites
Sega multi mega is a rare collectible item. No price tracking websites have it. You need to frequent online groups or forums of enthusiasts. eBay may have ones, but information (e.g color) may be missing, and follow-up is required. OpenClaw can do that for you.
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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.
I mean, yes, some people have real issues with delegating tasks to others. Those people probably wouldn't get much benefit from an... AI assistant. That doesn't "illustrate your point", it just states the obvious.
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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.
Well, it will work when there is enough demand. “Ever” is very long time. Are you willing to bet on it?
The point still, is that OpenClaw opens new exciting (and dangerous) opportunities for non technical users.
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.
My wife constantly asks me about adding books to her Kindle. I use Anna’s archive for this, but the process can be very annoying. I have to go to the site, search for the content. Filter by epub and English. Then download the content. Then send it to her Kindle email.
My openclaw now searches for the relevant content upon her request, sends the URL to a Stacks docker instance, monitors the Stacks instance for when the download completes, grabs the resulting epub from a local file share, then sends it to her kindle email. She doesn’t even send me the request anymore; she sends them straight to the Discord bot.
It also corrects our calendar every night. She often just through something on the calendar like “[son’s name] speech”, but we have speech appointments in either of two locations, and I have a strong preference for calendar items in the format “[person] - activity”. If she puts the city name with the speech appointments (“[son’s name] speech [town]”), openclaw reformats the title accordingly and adds the physical address of the speech therapy office we go to in that town. This means Apple Calendar sends us notifications when it’s time to leave, instead of just 30 mins prior.
I have a few others as well, but those are real world examples. Maybe they don’t matter for your use case, but they’re good for mine.
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Everything I’ve seen about it feels so over engineered