00:00 Speaker A
What exactly is Sam Altman building, Dan?
00:03 Dan
Yeah, it sounds like this is kind of a high-end smart speaker almost. Uh it supposedly uh has uh movable parts. Uh you should be able to carry it from room to room because it’ll have a battery. Uh and the big kind of to do about it uh is that it would be more personalized. It would run on ChatT, it would be able to take advantage uh of your personal context uh and have kind of a uh they say companion-like uh aspect to it, you know, using uh ChaT’s new voice uh improvements through ChaT Live. Uh and so, you you know, it does seem as though this uh is is the direction it it’s going. It’s not going to be seemingly a smartphone uh replacement at all, but more of something that would uh live in your home, although you would be able to, you know, I guess carry it with you if you want. Um, but it does kind of raise a question of, you know, okay, well, why do you need this if Amazon’s Echo exists or uh, you know, you have uh Google has its own uh smart home capabilities and you know, it’s adding Gemini to that obviously. Amazon’s updated Alexa with Alexa Plus. Uh, you know, obviously it’s not ChatT, but you know, it’s it’s not as though similar capabilities aren’t out there. And we’ve seen moving uh or movable uh uh smart speakers in the past uh that kind of follow you uh via a camera. So, you know, it it’s going to take a lot, I think for this to really blow up uh in in, you know, the consumer space. Don’t forget, just because it has the ChaT name, doesn’t mean that it’s automatically going to be a hot seller. Uh just look at Apple’s Homepods, which didn’t exactly, you know, knock people’s socks off, uh though they are from Apple, uh and just seem to kind of exist now, yeah, kind of like as a almost, hey, we still have this, we’re still in this space kind of product for Apple.
02:40 Speaker A
Yeah, why does Sam Altman you think, um, why does he feel like he needs hardware at all? Like what what’s the financial and maybe strategic advantage? Is it is it you know, is it open AI, they feel like, listen, we just have to own directly that customer relationship. Is that it?
03:07 Dan
Yeah, I think that’s really what it comes down to. Um, you know, you can use obviously Chat GT through the app, you can use it uh through uh your web browser. Um and you know, you you’re going to be able to use it now I guess through this this speaker. You know, if if you’re using uh your your iPhone and you need to you do something with an app or give it a certain command, why would you then offload that task to a secondary app like ChatBT instead of just going straight through uh your iPhone? And yes, ChatBT is available on your iPhone now. Uh you can ask a Siri question and I’ll say, do you want to excuse me, do you want to ask Siri, do you want to ask ChatBT? But, you know, I think if the the new version of Siri is good enough, why would you then switch over? So, I think it’s a matter of saying, look, we need to get into a hardware space so that we’re the default option and people will want to use us rather than having that extra friction uh there where people have to open up a secondary app to to access us.
