Forget virtual assistants, Asteria wants to be your AI friend

They are already taking device pre-orders and selling coins for their own cryptocurrency, but I wouldn&#x27;t give these guys any money right now. Other than blacking out our collective tech-hype bingo board, they&#x27;ve provided very little real information about how they intend to make any of this work.<p>From what they promise I&#x27;d expect their team to be stacked with AI researchers, but it looks like just a CEO, a COO and a single PhD &quot;advisor.&quot; Who&#x27;s going to actually build all this? Maybe that&#x27;s why their &quot;careers&quot; page shows that they are looking for everything from embedded systems to ML engineers.<p>Seems like either a money grab or an overly idealistic founding team happy to promise the world and figure out how to deliver it later.<p>Edit: nathantross, you posted this and you&#x27;re the COO, right? Wanna respond?

&gt; Eventually they&#x27;re predicting. Then you can do things like ambient intelligence where you can provide services and you can provide products or experiences to people before they know they need it.<p>So, it&#x27;s your friend...but it&#x27;s also there to sell you stuff. But just think of it as your friend.<p>It sounds like they don&#x27;t quite know what they&#x27;re selling or how it&#x27;s going to be useful to people (which they kinda admit). I could see getting utility from a VA that also suggests services for specific needs, but a friendship with &quot;ambient intelligence&quot; behind it figuring out how it&#x27;s going to chum up its next product placement? If it&#x27;s really a &quot;true AI&quot; why not sell it on that merit alone?

A clip on camera you can take with you while jogging or in a museum, and it talks to you? It would be pretty embarrassing to be seen with it. This would work out better in professional settings, such as in a hospital, providing help to doctors.

Talking cars and appliance were a fad a decade ago. They drove consumers crazy who disabled these features. Consumers only want emergency alerts and answers to inquiries, not bff with their toaster.

I heartily recommend Kill Process (2016) by William Hertling, where a startup trying to bootstrap a social network uses AI to avoid empty network problem. The novel describes the version of this &quot;done right&quot; pretty well.<p>Right now, you can find the version of this &quot;done wrong&quot; in &quot;dating site&quot; populated by chatbots.

I&#x27;m sick and tired of all these technologies that pretend to be AI, while they&#x27;re just some ML or DL (DeepLearnin&#x27;) algorithms going on...<p>Some words have become so vague and ambiguous in the computer world that sometimes I wish we would stop using them altogether, like: who is a hacker, what is AI, what is Cloud, etc.<p>Siri, GoogleNow, Cortana, Amazon Echo and others claim to be &quot;intelligent&quot; of some sort, but they&#x27;re just as smart as their programmers.<p>Please just stop labeling your next super cool algorithm an &quot;AI&quot;.

I am going to take a step back from the technical merits of this and say the whole thing seems sad. I don&#x27;t need a need a dog collar on my neck or a badge on my shirt. Lastly, you know life is over when you spend your time talking and hanging out with a AI bot. Our society has become so isolated because people are on Facebook and Instagram instead of talking to each other.

Really curious about how this will pan out as everything said in the article screams at me like someone has no clue how difficult making the device is going to be, regardless of how much ”AI” runs on it.<p>Hardware is really hard.

Reminds me of John Varley&#x27;s book Steel Beach. Set in the future, humans live on the Moon and everyone on Luna is connected to the central computer (CC) which behaves at once as government, friend, guide, psychologist, encyclopaedia and diary.<p>Fascinating stuff. Other topics in the book: nanotechnology and bioengineering as everyday commodities, gender fluidity and the CC-human relationship. Reminds me that the book is due for a reread!

Reminds me of the movie Her....

there is a 0% chance that this team can ship AI features. it&#x27;s probably inevitable, but still too bad, that the AI space attracts so much noise. makes it hard to see the teams doing real work.

To me it&#x27;s just Star Trek tech coming to reality again.

someone watcher &quot;Her&quot; and thought it&#x27;d be a good idea to do a kickstarter