I don't know if I love this more for the sheer usefulness, or for the delightful over-the-top "Proper English Butler" diction.

But what really has my attention is: Why is this something I'm reading about on this smart engineer's blog rather than an Apple or Google product release? The fact that even this small set of features is beyond the abilities of either of those two companies to ship -- even with caveats like "Must also use our walled garden ecosystem for email, calendars, phones, etc" -- is an embarrassment, only obscured by the two companies' shared lack of ambition to apply "AI" technology to the 'solved problem' areas that amount to various kinds of summarization and question-answering.

If ever there was a chance to threaten either half of this lumbering, anticompetitive duopoly, certainly it's related to AI.

This made me think: what if my little utility assistant program that I have, similar to your Stevens, had access to a mailbox?

I've got a little utility program that I can tell to get the weather or run common commands unique to my system. It's handy, and I can even cron it to run things regularly, if I'd like.

If it had its own email box, I can send it information, it could use AI to parse that info, and possibly send email back, or a new message. Now, I've got something really useful. It would parse the email, add it to whatever internal store it has, and delete the message, without screwing up my own email box.

Thanks for the insight.

This is the kind of pragmatic AI hack I want to see. It feels like sometimes we are forgetting why certain tooling even exists. To simplify things! No fancy vector DBs or complex architectures, just practical integration with existing data sources. Love it.

" Initially, Stevens spoke with a dry tone, like you might expect from a generic Apple or Google product. But it turned out it was just more fun to have the assistant speak like a formal butler. "

Honestly, saying way too little with way too much words (I already hate myself for it) is one of the biggest annoyances I have with LLM's in the personal assistant world. Until I'm rich and thus can spend the time having cute conversations and become friends with my voice assistant, I don't want J.A.R.V.I.S., I need LCARS. Am I alone in this?

I've been kicking around idea for a similar open source project, with the caveats that:

1. I'd like the backend to be configured for any LLM the user might happen to have access to (be that the API for a paid service or something locally hosted on-prem).

2. I'm also wondering how feasible it is to hook it up to a touchscreen running on some hopped-up raspberry pi platform so that it can be interacted with like an Alexa device or any of the similar offerings from other companies. Ideally, that means voice controls as well, which are potentially another technical problem (OpenAI's API will accept an audio file, but for most other services you'd have to do voice to text before sending the prompt off to the API).

3. I'd like to make the integrations extensible. Calendar, weather, but maybe also homebridge, spotify, etc. I'm wondering if MCP servers are the right avenue for that.

I don't have the bandwidth to commit a lot of time to a project like this right now, but if anyone else is charting in this direction I'd love to participate.