It’s not too late to reverse direction and call it “Oi”. Could there be a more perfect verbal activation? They could get Jason Statham or Vinnie Jones to do promotion.
Anything I've seen about Ive hints at him being a kind, passionate man. I don't agree with his design choices but that's no excuse to hate him as a person.
Reading about it, I see some characteristics: no screen, possibly something you can carry in your pocket, possibly has ai-driven awareness of its environment.
OpenAI wants to get into the hardware business, so they came up with something. Is it going to be something people actually want? I am skeptical, but as a consumer it's cool that so companies are trying out various new devices even if most of them are no good.
given the vagueness of the available information, i'm guessing they haven't actually defined its capabilities yet.
They can accept that building a smartphone is doomed to fail, and they want to build some hardware, so they're experimenting with all the "not a smartphone" form factors they can think of to see what sticks.
I think it is going to be a set-top device that casts to the TV with built in sensors and a camera to enable you to FaceTime with your AI assistant/friend.
I am absolutely AGOG to know why this has to be a separate device. It must involve hardware and/or instrumentation not built into smartphones. Microwave scanner? mini x-ray machine? neutrino detector??? what could it be
The market is ripe for ChatGPT in a box, replacing google home or Alexa desktop pucks. God knows the google home assistant has been detuned and detuned to the point it barely works for turning the lights on and off at this point. There's a handful of golf-ball shaped objects on AliExpress for $25 that provide this functionality, powered by an ESP32 IoT chip, but doesn't have wakeword capability (yet). I picked up two for a Home Assistant voice assistant project but haven't had time to dive into it yet.
I've got codex-cli with speech-to-text hooked up to (among other things) Home Assistant via MCP.
It'll do anything. I can literally tell it to play some music from a playlist and make the lights flash to the beat, and it'll just figure out how to do that.
Is it fast? Not really. Is it annoyingly slow for quick tasks like turning the lights off? Not too annoying anyway. Turning the lights on/off takes about 4 seconds from when I finish speaking.
Because Apple won’t give you access to what you need as a dev for this kind of thing on iPhone: always-on audio listening to multiple streams : ambient sound, my voice, whatever is playing in my headphones … think an AI assistant listens to audiobooks together with you and allows you to ask questions / lookup things etc …
I wonder why they're trying to establish separate branding for hardware. Considering that OpenAI's strongest advantage right now is the ChatGPT brand and they're anyway cutting efforts on other products, wouldn't it make more sense to use the ChatGPT brand?
They certainly don't seem to have a problem with using the same name repeatedly given the 300-or-so products called Codex at OpenAI.
It’s such an uncreative name, anyway. It’s like something you’d read from a hardware engineering GitHub repository where the author was oblivious to how searchable the intellectual property would be.
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