Comment by piker
12 hours ago
Yes, and that's because the workflow of those people generally requires managing a crazy, dynamic schedule including travel, meetings, comms, etc. Those folks need real humans with long-term memories and incentives to establish trust for managing these high-stakes engagements. Their human assistants might find these things useful, but there's zero chance Bill Gates is having an AI schedule his travel plans or draft his text messages.
OTOH, this isn't an issue for "ordinary people". They go to work, school, children's sports events, etc. If they had an assistant for free, most of them would probably find it difficult to generate enough volume to establish the muscle memory of using them. In my own professional life, this occurred with junior lawyers and legal assistants--the juniors just never found them useful because they didn't need them even though they were available. Even the partners ended up consolidating around sharing a few of them for the same reason.
Down in this thread someone mentions it being an advanced Alexa, which seems apt. Yes, a party novelty but not useful enough to be top of mind in the every day work flow.
Side rant: A disproportionate amount of AI assistant marketing involves scenarios that look middle class, but actually require customers wealthy enough risk money on errors. Like buying the wrong thing, or even buying the right thing at the wrong price.
I am ordinary people. I have adhd. I have been dying for assistance in scheduling and planning. Am not employed enough to afford hiring a human yet. Am hopeful these will reach maturity for me to he able to host one on my own device. Or find a private provider with good security model and careful data handling.
Not +1, but +100 to your comment (fellow ADHD'er here). Even a virtual friend who'd help me stay on track would be excellent, and if I had a physical human assistant... that would legitimately make many aspects of my life much better. (Simple example: I could ask them to nag me to exercise.)
Going to the shop and buying groceries is not hard work. But I don't do that since delivery became available. I'm lazy and delivery is free. Same for ordinary people needs. It's not a big deal to manage my life, but if I can avoid doing that for free, that's probably what I'll do. For $200? Not sure. For $20? Absolutely. So the question is already about price.
Off-Topic: Are you sure delivery is free? When comparing prices online vs my local supermarket of the same brand, online prices trend higher. Locally the store also has more products on sale than available online. Only recently online shopping has become slightly cheaper because they now have “bulk” deals for 5-20% discount.