Google Assistant is pretty decent. But as someone who is pretty much locked into the Apple ecosystem, Siri needs a reboot from scratch.

It's been reportedly rewritten from scratch like five times, during which time people have not stopped posting claims that it's exactly the same as it was in 2010.

So is this going to be another clusterfuck like 10DLC? I am glad our company stuck with our guts and intentionally decided not to go outbound, but I almost feel bad for the startups that were banking on full outbound.

Interesting juxtaposition in the comments of "I don't answer calls from numbers I didn't recognize because of how scam-prone modern telephony is" with "many startups have seen huge profit opportunity in making outbound phone calls automatically at scale".

Reminds me of the story about overhearing Juul employees on BART talk about how hard they were working to make sure their kids never got anywhere near their product and that if other parents didn't do that, what happened next was their own fault.

Which direction did you go? Were following the space closely.

Looks like the FCC basically killed outbound AI calling companies like Air.ai, and does not seem to affect inbound companies like ours (https://echo.win)

Interestingly they explicitly mention AI generated voices, does that mean voices generated by traditional TTS engines are fine?

Those voices were already prohibited. This ruling specifically addresses agents "emulating human speech and interacting with consumers as though they were live human callers when generating voice and text messages".

Based on the (alarming) demo on Air.ai's homepage, that sounds like it would be prohibited unless the user consented to be contacted in that manner when providing their phone number.

So looks like the only allowed use cases will be for opt-in notifications and reminders.

Our company https://echo.win/ provides inbound phone call automation and management using AI for businesses. Generative voices are going to add a lot of value to our product.

I have had luck with doing this on GPT4 with careful prompting, but GPT 3.5 is pretty reluctant to respond with anything other than straight up conversational answers.

I just saw that Azure OpenAI service has a SLA and OpenAI does not. I thought they would have separated the infrastructure for free ChatGPT users and paying API customers.

I think their models all run on Azure infrastructure?!

They do, but Azure also provides a different OpenAI service with different terms and SLA: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/cognitive-service...

When the big earthquake in Nepal happened in 2015, I was working with a volunteer organization called Translators Without Borders to help with translation during relief efforts. Since I was in the USA I could not contribute back physically, so this was the next best thing.

My goal was to help volunteers that were in the field in Nepal communicate in English -> Nepali and back. Even though this was somewhat effective, there was still a communication gap because most people in Nepal in remote parts could not even read in Nepali.

I looked around for solutions but couldn't find any Nepali Text To Speech solutions. The builder brain in me fired up and I decided to build a Nepali Text To Speech engine using some of the groundwork that was laid by Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya (Big Library in Nepal) which they had abandoned halfway.

I spend all night hacking along to build a web app that let the volunteers paste translated text and have it spoken. The result was https://nepalispeech.com/ and the first iteration of this was built in just 13 ish hours.

I hope the people that got affected by the earthquake are in a better situation now.

Hello and thank you!

This reminds me of AutoIt. It was a scripting language for windows that helped with UI automation, and it was one of the things that opened up the world of programming to me when I was 12.

I quit Amazon a couple weeks ago to start a startup, and I felt like I was reading my own story at some points. The tooling was the biggest thing dragging me back. It's hard to get excited about what you are building when you have to wait 2-4 minutes to preview your changes when most industry standard tools / stacks can do it instantly.

I left this feedback a bunch of times with different people in the org and I really hope they scrap their janky "frameworks" and dev tooling. They should just move to more standard open source tools options that evolve and get better quicker than barely maintained internal tooling.

Open Source tools also have bigger communities and resources online to debug and solve issues, compared to mediocre documentation from internal wiki. If absolutely needed, make thin wrappers above open source tools. Some other teams within Amazon had the luxury of using better tools, but I bet a lot of people are in the shoes I was in.

2-4 minutes????

Minimum 20 minutes to build my team's packages. Integration tests didn't run locally and you'd have to push. Same thing for LPT/CFN changes.

Tooling at Amazon is _incredibly advanced_, but no teams know how to use it properly.