The tech seems neat and all but please stop multitasking while driving, encouraging others to multitask while driving, and building products specifically designed to encourage multitasking while driving.
If you want to work while you're in transit: take public transit.
HANG UP AND DRIVE!
Don't talk, don't try to do anything other maybe listening to some music while you're driving.
In 2025 we can’t spend 10 minutes without doing something else while traveling at speeds that would make a sailor blush.
Try it out - watching this is sooo soothing and relaxing. :-)
Building tech is usually clearer than finding a clear use case for it. As we find ways to mature the tech to be aligned with the ultimate vision we have, we will test various problems the immature tech can solve.
With that being said, if you have any ideas where this could really help people (for instance people with motor disabilities), please share them. We would like to serve people and build with humility.
Lots of folks in safety critical situations rely on multitasking and voice commands: law enforcement, firefighters, pilots, heavy equipment operators, armed forces, etc. Many of them are in situations in which not multitasking isn't an option and receive special training to minimize risks. That being said now you're entering heavily regulated industries where the stakes couldn't be higher... not exactly an easy place for LLMs and startups to play.
On the other end of the spectrum there is a tried and true industry for tech innovations where the stakes couldn't be lower: adult entertainment. There's millions of adults wishing they could operate screens without needing a hand free. Might not be as glamorous as helping firefighters and people with motor disabilities, but we all need to make a living.
Best wishes!
That being said, my bike ride to work is a quiet 30 mins. This would be insanely useful for that. I always get to work with a stack of messages piled up, both ways.
People do not multitask well. The median driver can barely keep a car on the road in perfect weather on a good day. Please stop helping distract them!
Luckily, most states lave laws about this, and drivers will get fined. Sadly, manufacturers rarely get fined. The people who made the original "hands on wheel" defeat device for Teslas got away with it, IIRC
In the bay though. Holy crap driving here was a wake up call for me. You cannot drive distracted here. I've driven in every major US city. The bay is by far the worst. Yes even then NYC, ATL and Miami. Chicago or Houston is a probably 2nd worst.
At the same time my partner often gets mad at me for refusing to do anything but focus when I drive. So I agree in general but I'm not everyone. This device seems like it will help people avoid incidents.
I hate to be this guy but I've lost too many people for small stupid mistakes. The equivalent of this is getting killed when you accidentally bump into someone in the supermarket. This is just not fair.
Never take a chance, stay safe, life is precious and fragile.
Quickly, before you kill someone
I concur with the other comments, this is a "yes dear" moment that you'll appreciate once you're older.
Or worse, someone else.
If someone kills themselves because they are driving distracted and they chose to distract themselves, that's just evolution IMO. But if anyone else is hurt, then it is a tragedy.
I'm contributing to a similar open source coding tool [1] and I see the same skewed reaction: voice control of "whatever" while driving gets 5-10x the clicks of any other demo.
There's a logical reason so many people think of voice control while driving. It's not because they're reckless.
It reflects the hierarchy of needs. People with long commutes (often younger, lower-paid engineers living further out) spend 2+ hours driving daily.
This is their biggest time sink, so of course they think about making it productive. When you're living far out for cheap housing and hear "coding while driving", its easy to think: finally, a way to get ahead without choosing between career growth and seeing my family.
Again, I think its just an off-the-cuff reaction, not actually what people will do. Just like people try your app and tell you its amazing but then never pay. Doing stuff while driving just sounds nice until you know... you think about it for 3 seconds and yeah, its bad idea.
To me the point of voice control is walking. I'm thinking of Einstein, Darwin, Thoreau. They believed that physical activity helped stimulate his mind and spark creative thought.
You walk, you think, and occasionally you say something.
But in practice people have been quick to jump to conclusions that surprise me. Such as "the point is to try to kill people".
So I'm merely working backwards to figure out why people want to jump in a car first thing.
And the charitable explanation is the people are just not thinking to carefully and are just excited by seeing a computer respond to voice with a low enough error rate.
But the blue founders here don't fall into the first category, and they made a 2 minute ad advertising their product that doesn't fall into the second category either. Charity only stretches so far.
I'm not a startup investor, but I'm quite serious when I say that ad would give me serious doubts about doing business with this founder for purely practical reasons (on top of other ethical ones). That doesn't mean the product is bad, but a business is more than a product.
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HN definitely does have a dog piling problem where one issue is picked out by the community and discussed ad nauseam to exclusion of all else. To be honest between the magnitude of this issue and the fairly significant discussion downthread about other topics I'm not particularly feeling that it is a problem in this thread though.
If all you are trying to do is finding the right podcast episode, it might be quite a bit better than fiddling with a screen.
But... cognitive load is a thing.
https://road-safety.transport.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2021...
The reason conversations can be held safely between the driver and with (some! people are different) other occupants in the same car, is that all occupants can asses what is happening and react to microcues from the driver in realtime. (Phone calls add many milliseconds in reaction time, plus the other person is not situationally aware.)
I do think an AI could help here though. This app isn't quite that. The AI would have to be very fast and responsive, notice with cameras and microphones when the driver needs a microbreak in the conversation, seamlessly continue when appropriate, perhaps be plugged in to the car radar and so on. Really be a polite and attentive passenger.
About me: I’m a robotics and product design engineer focused on building thoughtful tools for the world. I hold dozens of patents in hardware and manufacturing, and I care deeply about how things are made and who they’re made for.
For over a decade, I’ve worked across robotics, wearables, and consumer electronics. As one of the first engineers on the Apple Vision Pro, I took it from concept to mass production.
I'm also in the wearables space, though neurotech/sleeptech.
I'm assuming you did 3d printed enclosures, so really board design and was the longest process.
What I think is really clever about your design is passthrough USB-C and then not needing your own battery. So essentially you've got a micro, probably with it's own memory?
So elegant.
Others are saying you must have had your Taiwan contacts beforehand, but even without that, two weeks for board manufacturing isn't unrealistic I'd think, even for a noob, and lucky for you the board design should have been pretty simple.
Can I ask what your experience going through YC as a consumer hardware founder was like?
If you're curious about what we're building, we're enhancing the restorative function of sleep, without altering sleep time. Check out https://affectablesleep.com
I think for consumer, if you can really simplify the product and solve the absolute basic version, the costs should be low enough to validate the idea. YC will value your skills to create this simple version, and that you are able to actually execute and create something that could be real.
The missing link was really showing I could take a prototype and mass produce it (even at a small scale). That was what this whole exercise was about.
One additional note that comes to mind, building really great partnerships is essential for hardware to work.
My previous start-up was acquired
Our technology is in use in clinical trials. We've begun pre-sales, and are in selection of contract manufacturer.
I only decided to apply for the next round last night. Would it be ok if I ask to get your opinion on a few of the application questions? When we get to that point? Probably not for a few weeks.
We're fortunate that our hardware engineer and industrial engineer both have extensive experience in manufacturing.
But it seems like a terrible hack - using the phone through the limited interface designed for humans instead of actually using the proper APIs. Not to say that any effort from Apple to improve Siri will just render this product obsolete instantly.
Joyce flew from Taiwan to make sure I had them in my hands, folded boxes with me in the office, and just as she got over her jet lag and went back to Taiwan.
Y’all made a lot of smart choices to keep your timetable. Not least of which was finding - and listening to - a good CM partner.
We live in a physical world, and some of us should build things for it.
It eventually needs to do something the phone software cant do itself. For example more powerful AI chip than the phone has.
In some ways, if this instigates them implement it in their OS, we are doing our job, and then we can pivot and keep working on ideas that we hope will serve others.
One obvious dumb question is is there a video input for the device? I mean how does it know what screen it's on, where to find the buttons to click. It seems like the next level would be to add a video capture device too
For example, if you're old enough, do you remember those devices that were all about getting your phone/ipod with a 3.5mm jack to interface with your car audio system? There were 3.5mm -> cassette adapters, and bluetooth -> 3.5mm dongles abound before bluetooth became commonplace in cars and phones.