Progress on our AI x Hardware project! We have near real-time conversation with both a 2D and 3D animated bot running. These will eventually be full blown paintings you can hang on your wall. Demo videos are unedited. Thoughts below👇

We’ve thought a bit more about consumer and B2B use cases. Unlike the R1 or the Humane pin, this device is more ambient computing: you can hang it as a painting. Fully RAG compatible and capable of function calling. Near real time, handles interruptions, looks at you.

We were inspired by this painting in Harry Potter, but I think we need to first make the avatar more human-like. A strange and funny learning we had is that most people will find the anime avatar fine, but have problems with the 3D avatar for the expressionless face.

The minute something starts looking like a real face, we expect it to have real expressions or it doesn’t sit right with us. No such expectations with the anime avatar, and it tells you a lot about the brain’s relationship with faces. VASA1 may work.

This could be a way to immortalise your loved ones. You download our app, make your parents talk to it everyday (it asks a series of personal and non personal questions stores in a secure way), and then we cook and send you a fine tune of your dad in a painting.

This is very similar to the AI of Superman’s father he carries with him to earth. A way to carry forward the wisdom, warmth and mannerisms of a person.

As base models and techniques get better, we can continue to send you updates to the model. However, this is all “open dreaming”. I’m fairly confident that we can clone a real face, the audio, and the wisdom and speaking style, but there’s so much work left.

Our first versions may just be famous people who could license us their personality, but I’m more inclined to start with B2B use cases like a virtual receptionist. With function calling, it’s easy to register new visitors to your home or office and unlock doors programmatically.

But the most likely outcome is failure. We are fully aware of this. Hardware is really hard, and unlike some of our peers who have raised 100s of millions of $, this was built bootstrapped. I don’t think it’s wise to raise funding, our constraints have made us think laterally.

But as always, gotta try! :)

It looks very good. There is a market for this. 1. Stock market running commentary like cricket 2. Customize the required stocks and feed the real online news relates to the stocks 3. Set up alerts for stock markets. 4. Integrate with blue tooth head set 5. Make it small so that people can carry this. There are other target markets but there are working professionals who are part of stock market. They will buy this. One may ask why mobile phones cannot be used? Stock market is high sensitive heavy data capturing money earning element. People need this without distractions. Mobile phones are objection. (Just a opinion).