Show HN: I built an AI voice agent for Gmail

34 points · chrisnolet · 2 days ago

Hello again, HN! I’ve been using my DSL to create new voice experiences.

I’ve made an AI-powered email client for Gmail that you talk to, using your microphone. (I highly recommend using earbuds or headphones! Or the best is with Ray-Ban Meta glasses.)

Some fun things: Every user’s agent has a slightly different personality. You can train it by asking it to remember things for next time. And it presents some generative UI while you use it.

This is the first time I’m showing this publicly. I’d love your feedback! What works well, and what doesn’t?

I previously did a Show HN for ‘D&D meets Siri’: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41328794. I’m thinking of releasing the framework/DSL that I’m using to craft these experiences. Would that be interesting? Would you want to build voice apps?

27 comments

upwardbound2 · 1 days ago

This looks incredibly cool and I really want to try it with my real email account (rather than a throwaway test account). In order to enable people to consider taking that leap, can you please provide more information about where the data will be sent and stored, and your legal liability, if any? Everyone's real email accounts contain extremely sensitive financial and medical secrets that allow identity theft or could even physically endanger the person if they are a reporter in a corrupt regime or something like that.

- Can you please provide a list of the companies that you send data to? Do you use OpenAI? Speaking plainly, I do not trust OpenAI to honor any legal commitments about what they will or won't do with any data sent to them. They are being sued because they systematically violated copyright law at a mass scale -- data theft -- and so I absolutely do not ever want even a single one of my emails going to that company. (Fool me once, ..)

- What exactly do you mean by this line in the Privacy Policy? "We do not use user data obtained through third-party APIs to develop, improve, or train generalized AI and/or ML models." https://pocket.computer/privacy If I read this literally, it sounds like you are saying that you won't use my private emails to train AGI (Artificial General Intelligence, aka superintelligence), which is good I guess, but I also don't really want you to train any AI/ML models of any kind with my emails, because of very real concerns about training data memorization and regurgitation.

Thank you. Providing honesty and transparency and engaging with privacy rights advocates like immigrants' rights advocates would be very good to consider. If you make a mistake here it could result in innocent families being split apart by ICE, for example.

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vishrajiv · 1 days ago

It works surprisingly well! I thought it’d just be a read interface but it archives and marks as read like I asked. This would be useful when I commute to work.

Drafting replies would be necessary, of course.

It sounds like you have a library to make these voice apps. To my knowledge, people just use providers like Vapi or Retell. What’s the difference here?

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vidyesh · 1 days ago

I am not a gmail(web interface) user, so haven't used it but congrats on the launch! I like how your landing page is so simple and small. And the domain is amazing!

I just wanted to point out, I love my Firefox but the gradient animation is so bad on Firefox!

At first I thought oh cool bg animation, checked the dev tools to know what it is only to realize this shouldn't be a color band animation as I see it!

Chromium based browser have it so subtle, that I barely notice that animation, I question does it even exist on it(it does!)?

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protocolture · 1 days ago

>I previously did a Show HN for ‘D&D meets Siri’:

I have been messing around with something similar for roleplaying. If you have sourcecode or something to release I would be interested.

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wferrell · 1 days ago

Is there a YouTube of this?

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