“Eventually, Mei decides she’s had enough of Dot interfering in every aspect of her life, uninstalls Dot, and goes about her business as usual, determined to interact with reality in a more wholehearted way.”
"Dot is, at its most simple, an app you chat with on iOS. You can send it words, voice memos, pictures, PDFs, and it’s thrilled to search the web for you, too. Communicating through written text (Dot’s voice is coming next year)" [0].
It looks quite "ambitious"[1]:
- Automated File Management: Dot creates, organizes, and retrieves both structured and unstructured information.
- Adaptive Intelligence: It learns from patterns in your behavior, plus any guidance you decide to share with it
- Internet Browsing: It has access to up-to-date information (and eventually, tools and services)
- Contextual Multimodal Understanding: It interprets text, audio, visuals, and links, informed by the context it already has on you
- Self-Programming: Dot proactively writes and stores routines, anticipating your future needs
- Personalized Display and Retrieval: It transforms information into the most compelling format for each user
- Conceptual Synthesis: It doesn’t just store information — it connects the dots between topics, ideas, and themes in your life
- Theory of Mind: Dot synthesizes a deeper understanding of your motivations and goals, while reflecting on how it can best help you to achieve them.
Their privacy policy lists OpenAI as one of their partners for data processing, which indicates that this is happening not on your device, and data is also shared with third parties.
For me this is the main counterargument against apps like these. I want to feel free to post any information into this without thinking about who may read or use it.
Local is the only way to go for software like this in my opinion.
Yeah reading this web page I just keep thinking “Mei has trusted a cloud based service to be her personal confidant for all aspects of her life including text and documents. This will end poorly for Mei.”
That also means it's useless for interacting with your life if your life happens to include anything above a PG-13 rating, what with how cloyingly pearl-clutching the OpenAI offerings are about sex or violence.
"We will never monetize your data. We will never monetize your attention. And we believe that the only way we can build towards the future we envision is through the continuous reinforcement of mutual trust and respect. Currently, we leverage best-in-class cloud-hosted models, including ones from OpenAI, Anthropic, and a selection of open-source options. Over time, we plan to reduce external dependence and localize computing to run on-device."
Great, then they should just put their promise into a legally binding irrevocable clause in their terms of service and also legally guarantee that their entire business will shut down if they violate it. They are never going to do it anyways, so no harm in enforcing what they are never going to do.
I don't want to be limited by the little CPU on my phone. Maybe one day it'll be powerful enough for all these tasks. But until then, I want a big H100 computing for me. And I want to pay for it! I don't want to be in a position where the service is trying to give me as little compute as possible. Putting me at the center, I want it to do whatever massive compute it needs to to make my life easier.
> Dot remembers Mei’s interest in singing and proactively sends her suggestions for music clubs at school.
Imagine having so little agency and motivation within your own existence on this earth that you need an app to remind of what you once found life—affirming.
This is the kind of thing where adoption and user mass matters a great deal. If thois is successful and apple are too slow to roll out something like this, don't expect a lot of users to "just switch" out of what they've invested a great deal of personal data and routine into. It'd have to be something even deeper, like OS level integration.
> It'd have to be something even deeper, like OS level integration.
Which of course it will, since it’ll be part of Siri.
Edit: also, even if Apple shipped (hypothetically) the exact same product, they would still have a massive advantage by being able to ship it on every single device they sell. Even if Dot succeeds beyond its creators’ wildest dreams, it will still only capture a tiny fraction of the market compared to what Apple would if they shipped it with the OS.
Yeah I would be terrified to stack something I build against Apple just due to the integration level. It’s so easy to get muscled out, they own the walled garden. It’s interesting how they’ve abstracted out of the typical web app access pattern and into the operating system itself, yet they compete seamlessly. It almost feels like a cage to not have their level of access.
Something like this is most certainly going to become the mainstream interface for computing. I think the most likely thing that will hit mass market adoption will look much more like the voice interface in Her than a chat app. I couldn't imagine my mom getting much utility out of an app like this but if the AI is good enough I could certainly see her chatting with her phone as if it was a person.
the problem with voice interfaces is.. How does that work, in public? Late at night when the family is asleep? In noisy environments? During meetings or movies? During conversations with other people?
Movies/tv shows voice interfaces work well because the environment and situations where it happens is 100% controlled and driven by plot. The real world is so much messier...
I see a great opportunity for chat interfaces like this one among younger audience. Every one knows how chat works, they are everywhere. And file systems or even tags are not so ubiquitously understood.
I immediately recognized this as either inspired from or actually from the same creators of the mercuryos concept https://www.mercuryos.com/. Turns out it's the latter.
I love the Mercury OS concept and think it's design both elegantly and sort of subversively packs a myriad of potentially breakthrough ideas.
I have been stewing with ideas around the same vision for years. The idea of a new type of UI where the UI seams to dematerialize, where you directly manipulate the object in your current context (like multi-touch's direct manipulation but at a higher layer of abstraction powered by deep api integrations, intelligent self-assembling relational graphs, and of course ai). For over a decade I've had this thought "the data becomes the UI" like an emergent UI from whatever given data, task or context you are currently in. When I came across the mercuryos concept I immediately smiled.
Conceptually, strategically and technically there are so many challenges to introducing such a new ux paradigm but I'm very happy to see the mercuryos concept has seemed to evolve to New Computer's Dot and I wish them the best!
For those immediately turning to negative sentiment based on privacy or "it's just a gpt4 wrapper" I can see why that could be the knee-jerk reaction but I wouldn't underestimate a sturdy design-philosophy approach like this one. I'd go as far as to make comparisons to Next Computer's NextStepOS. NextStep introduced so many groundbreaking UX concepts and to a large extent I think their personal computing contemporaries underestimated what potential it packed. And, yes, I know the business model and many other factors played into an inevitable doom for Next Computer but there's belief that Steve Jobs may have never intended for Next to become a dominant computing player and instead knew it'd be an irresistible acquisition target in a latent space of UX innovation. It's possible he saw the next evolution of personal computing UX and hedged his bet on not compromising on it. Yet another comparison could be that NextStepOS needed more cpu, graphics and connectivity power to truly display it's heightened level of UX much in the same way something like Dot or mercuryOS would inherently need to leverage cutting-edge computing to truly enable it's vision (obviously LLM's, Vector DB's, etc).
I don't think it ever failed in the sense it never shipped because that was out of scope.
It was never meant to be an end-product. It was a concept/case-study. Happy they're finally realising that vision.
I worked on a project like this. The biggest challenge we had was finding ux patterns that keep returning the user to interact with the app and fill context gaps as it becomes convenient.
I wish those guys lots of luck but I'm not signing up. Excessively logging my life on somebody else's computer is not on my key interests any more.
Readit News
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9354944/
"Do you mind if I look through your hard drive?"
"Umm... okay"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV01B5kVsC0 (3:35)
I do like this part a lot, as a loner guy but I cannot trust something I didn't make (tinfoil hat guy digs silica by hand)
It looks quite "ambitious"[1]:
- Automated File Management: Dot creates, organizes, and retrieves both structured and unstructured information.
- Adaptive Intelligence: It learns from patterns in your behavior, plus any guidance you decide to share with it
- Internet Browsing: It has access to up-to-date information (and eventually, tools and services)
- Contextual Multimodal Understanding: It interprets text, audio, visuals, and links, informed by the context it already has on you
- Self-Programming: Dot proactively writes and stores routines, anticipating your future needs
- Personalized Display and Retrieval: It transforms information into the most compelling format for each user
- Conceptual Synthesis: It doesn’t just store information — it connects the dots between topics, ideas, and themes in your life
- Theory of Mind: Dot synthesizes a deeper understanding of your motivations and goals, while reflecting on how it can best help you to achieve them.
[0] https://www.fastcompany.com/90975882/meet-dot-an-ai-companio...
[1] https://new.computer/about
For me this is the main counterargument against apps like these. I want to feel free to post any information into this without thinking about who may read or use it.
Local is the only way to go for software like this in my opinion.
Deleted Comment
"We will never monetize your data. We will never monetize your attention. And we believe that the only way we can build towards the future we envision is through the continuous reinforcement of mutual trust and respect. Currently, we leverage best-in-class cloud-hosted models, including ones from OpenAI, Anthropic, and a selection of open-source options. Over time, we plan to reduce external dependence and localize computing to run on-device."
Imagine having so little agency and motivation within your own existence on this earth that you need an app to remind of what you once found life—affirming.
It'd be like a friend saying "oh hey I know you like singing, I spotted these clubs you might like".
And when Apple does it, the processing will be done on-device.
[1] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sherlocked
Which of course it will, since it’ll be part of Siri.
Edit: also, even if Apple shipped (hypothetically) the exact same product, they would still have a massive advantage by being able to ship it on every single device they sell. Even if Dot succeeds beyond its creators’ wildest dreams, it will still only capture a tiny fraction of the market compared to what Apple would if they shipped it with the OS.
Looks like Apple already has already been working on it with their Journal App (in Beta now). [0]
[0] https://beebom.com/journal-app-iphone/
a more recent example this was F.lux, which Apple implemented as "Night Shift"
Movies/tv shows voice interfaces work well because the environment and situations where it happens is 100% controlled and driven by plot. The real world is so much messier...
What's Her?
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/
I love the Mercury OS concept and think it's design both elegantly and sort of subversively packs a myriad of potentially breakthrough ideas.
I have been stewing with ideas around the same vision for years. The idea of a new type of UI where the UI seams to dematerialize, where you directly manipulate the object in your current context (like multi-touch's direct manipulation but at a higher layer of abstraction powered by deep api integrations, intelligent self-assembling relational graphs, and of course ai). For over a decade I've had this thought "the data becomes the UI" like an emergent UI from whatever given data, task or context you are currently in. When I came across the mercuryos concept I immediately smiled.
Conceptually, strategically and technically there are so many challenges to introducing such a new ux paradigm but I'm very happy to see the mercuryos concept has seemed to evolve to New Computer's Dot and I wish them the best!
For those immediately turning to negative sentiment based on privacy or "it's just a gpt4 wrapper" I can see why that could be the knee-jerk reaction but I wouldn't underestimate a sturdy design-philosophy approach like this one. I'd go as far as to make comparisons to Next Computer's NextStepOS. NextStep introduced so many groundbreaking UX concepts and to a large extent I think their personal computing contemporaries underestimated what potential it packed. And, yes, I know the business model and many other factors played into an inevitable doom for Next Computer but there's belief that Steve Jobs may have never intended for Next to become a dominant computing player and instead knew it'd be an irresistible acquisition target in a latent space of UX innovation. It's possible he saw the next evolution of personal computing UX and hedged his bet on not compromising on it. Yet another comparison could be that NextStepOS needed more cpu, graphics and connectivity power to truly display it's heightened level of UX much in the same way something like Dot or mercuryOS would inherently need to leverage cutting-edge computing to truly enable it's vision (obviously LLM's, Vector DB's, etc).
Ok, I'm done, lol.
See https://uxdesign.cc/introducing-mercury-os-f4de45a04289
I wish those guys lots of luck but I'm not signing up. Excessively logging my life on somebody else's computer is not on my key interests any more.