Comment by drzaiusapelord | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drzaiusapelord | Hacker News Reader

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Old timer here as well. The 'Virtual Girl' brings back memories of the 'personal assistant' fad from way back when. Funny how we've gone back to that now that the technology is more than a gimmick with Siri, Cortana, Alexa, and GNow. Sometimes I wonder about that peroid where so many things were possible (and tried!) but the technology and infrastructure just wasn't there to make it feasible. For all the lamenting about the loss of privacy, the reality is that assistants like these aren't possible without being able to dip into our emails and browse/purchase histories. That's something Bonzi Buddy couldn't do.

We live in an odd time where the promises of the late 90s and early 2000's are coming to fruition. Suddenly VR is amazing and relatively affordable. Suddenly digital personal assistants are here and they work. The promise of a less powerful Microsoft is here and with IE a now discontinued product. Very fast internet is here with many markets having or will soon have 1gbps (note: the first LAN I worked on was 10mbps). The promise of early yet clunky smartphone/PDA revolution has also been fulfilled.

I wonder if, from a networked/social/mobile computing, perspective that period was our 'Mother of All Demos.' So much was tried and promised back then and its only in the fast few years that its really practical.

A personal assistant may "dip into emails" but shouldn't phone home. Otherwise the personal assistant metaphor doesn't fit, and other, less pleasant descriptions apply.

Your emails are already at 'home' or a similar cloud solution with questionable privacy policies. These assistants don't actually run on your device, just their front ends are run on your device. I think you're making a distinction that doesn't really exist with common use cases.

As far as what is reported back to the home company, well, that pre-dates personal assistants. What gmail does with your email or dropbox with your files and any analysis your usage is a completely separate issue than personal assistants, aside from both of them having to do with privacy. It seems to me these assistants are just dipping into stuff 'home' has had access to for a decade plus. Instead of using that info to sell to marketers or whatever, its using that info to provide value to you by powering your assistant.

The email problem may be solved separately by a yet unknown solution - maybe encryption will be part of the next Iteration.

"Personal assistants" that listen in on conversation, waiting for a keyword - that's a completely different dimension than "just" reading email.

You can disable the 'always listening' option in most (all?) of these products and just have a press to talk option. I leave mine on for convenience. There's no law saying you need to if you want to use these technologies.

- defaults matter and shape behaviour/expectations - disabling these options is often difficult - other people's phones listen to me as well - ...

Ahh the Microsoft Bob failed experiment and comically-annoying Office Assistant "Clippy"... the good ol' days. IIRC you usually had to custom install Office without the Office Assistant, desktop Toolbar and remove some other optional component which always slowed down a computer to a crawl (the early multiuser text input IIRC on Windows NT/2k/95/98).

Interestingly, recently Apple and Google both missed out on acquiring Viv as Microsoft snapped them up... ostensibly, an assistant far more integrated into third-party services with better integration developer tools/support and smarter AI. Apple and Google gotta double down on either lifting up Siri/Google's equiv. to that playing field or acquire other talent/tech to keep up.

As an aside, Microsoft finally has Nadella at the helm, whom built Azure, whom seems a better/different engineer/businessman than perhaps even Gates (much needed after Balmer)... although you can't argue that Gates didn't break ground in lopsided EULA/SLSAs for extreme profiteering (which was "better" for stockholders but "worse" for users, probably unsustainably so).

Wow, Bonzi Buddy. The memories. Hadn't heard or thought that name in easily 10 years!

> the first LAN I worked on was 10mbps

Is that what counts as old timer these days? wags cane

> The promise of early yet clunky smartphone/PDA revolution has also been fulfilled.

Hardly. The "personal" in assistant should relate to the owner of the thing, not to the people pushing it. In that sense there are few enough "personal computers", but 99.999% of all smartphones in use out there are no more personal than the posters a prisoner might put up on their cell wall. Yes, there is none configured exactly as yours, but it's still not yours personally.

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