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Technology

Augment: an AI Productivity Assistant

I’ve previously indicated that Mark Zuckerberg has everything backwards. Instead of mining people’s data and using it against them, he should be charging people to mine their own social media data to help them understand themselves better.

It looks like a company called Augment AI Corp is kind of taking a step towards this in creating an AI assistant called Augment that “learns your needs” and “supports” you with your productivity.

Augment is a first-of-its-kind context-aware AI, dedicated to helping you excel through your hectic work day, freeing up time for you to do the things you love. It learns your needs and provides you with the type of support that we used to only dream about.

No more being caught off guard by another calendar alert because of back-to-back meetings, wasting time trying to dig for context, or struggling to take notes. Your Augment tells you everything you need to know about the meeting, including what led up to it; takes notes; captures the presentation materials, and summarizes it all for you afterward. It’s AI that actually works for you as a true ear-whispering, task-doing assistant.

In my opinion, the real potential of AI technology will be when it can analyze what your interests are in terms of the personal knowledge management flows that you’re aggregating (i.e. reading, watching, etc) and then analyze the patterns and relationships within it to provide insights on understanding who you are on a deeper level.

In effect, there’s a lot of hype these days about understanding your passion and purpose, with a lot of people misunderstanding what that actually means. It’s not surface things (i.e. job, interests, etc) but rather the patterns and relationships between everything you do that’s often hidden below the surface of your life but which unifies your life as a whole. I honestly believe the right AI technology that’s optimized for this, could actually help a person to reflectively become aware and “know thyself” on a deeper level.

Categories
Technology

Sonos Working on “More New Categories Than Ever Before”

My conventional work from the past used to focus on simplifying technology for people, which included everything from computer hardware and software, home electronics, to everything related to Web development.

Today while I still somewhat stay on top of all of these things, I’m primarily just interested in mobile computing technologies (i.e. iPhone, iPad), smart home technology (including voice assistants), and Web platform technologies (i.e. WordPress).

One company that I love using their products at home and have been tracking them for some time is Sonos. The main reason for this is that I typically dislike the hard-coded functionality in most products today (and hard-coded behaviours in companies) but Sonos products actually allow for a lot of decently flexibility in terms of the different music services and different voice assistants you can use with them but also third party services like IFTTT that can be connected with them for more advanced home automation.

Recently with many companies preparing to transition their products to the Matter smart home protocol, allowing their products to interconnect and interoperate with other company’s products, I’ve been wondering if Sonos was going to make a larger move in the smart home space due to previous technologies they’ve acquired over the last couple of years, specifically their voice assistant technologies which were released this year.

In a recent interview on Yahoo Finance (shown above), it seems as though the CEO of Sonos specifically stated that they are “working on more new categories than ever before”, so it will be interesting to see if anything new is released by Christmas of this year. Strongly rumoured is the introduction of wireless headphones with the ability to listen to music at extremely high quality levels, thus far superior to typical Bluetooth connections. I also hope they figure out some way of integrating Apple Siri voice assistant support in their products without requiring an Apple HomePod Mini device (which is ludicrous that Apple would require that for the integration).