For me: A local model to plug in to Apple photos to look for metadata inconsistencies in my photo librar, add missing location information, add dates from those old scanned photos with the date on the corner.
>A recommendation engine that looks at my browsing history, sees what blog posts or articles I spent the most time on, then searches the web every night for things I should be reading that I’m not. In the morning I should get a digest of links
I don't understand why Google, Brave, or Mozilla are not building this. This already exists in a centralized form like X's timeline for posts, but it could exist for the entire web. From a business standpoint, being able to show ads on startup or after just a click, is less friction than requiring someone to have something in mind they want to search and type it.
> 9. A minimalist ebook reader that lets me read ebooks, but I can highlight passages and have the model explain things in more depth off to the side. It should also take on the persona of the author. It should feel like an extension of the book and not a separate chat instance.
> A minimalist ebook reader that lets me read ebooks, but I can highlight passages and have the model explain things in more depth off to the side. It should also take on the persona of the author. It should feel like an extension of the book and not a separate chat instance.
Isn’t this just a chrome extension that sends data back and forth with chat gpt token?
A hybrid of Strong (the lifting app) and ChatGPT where the model has access to my workouts, can suggest improvements, and coach me. I mainly just want to be able to chat with the model knowing it has detailed context for each of my workouts (down to the time in between each set).
Strong really transformed my gym progression, I feel like its autopilot for the gym. BUT I have 4x routines I rotate through (I'll often switch it up based on equipment availability), but I'm sure an integrated AI coach could optimize.
I would love for my phone keyboard (Swiftkey) to use a locally-running Voxtral for speech-to-text (bonus points if it can use the NPU of the Snapdragon SoC).
The voice recognition capabilities of Google Speech Services, which is what the mic button hooks into, suck. Meanwhile, Voxtral (and Whisper) understand what I'm trying to say far better, they automatically "edit out" any stuttering or stammering that I might have, and they properly capitalize and include punctuation. And they handle being bilingual exceedingly well, including, for example, using English words in the middle of French sentences.
But it has some downsides. First, I have to manually switch to that different keyboard; thankfully my Samsung phone offers an easy switch shortcut any time a keyboard is on screen, so it only requires 3 taps... and thankfully it's smart enough to send me back to Swiftkey once it's done. Second, only 30 seconds... sometimes I ramble on for longer. Third, the way it's designed kind of sucks: you either have to hold a button (even though the point of speech-to-text is that I don't have to hold anything down) or let automatic detection end the recording and start processing, in which case it often cuts me off if I take more than 1 second thinking about my next words.
This is arguably one of the biggest use cases of modern AI technology and the least controversial one; phones have the hardware necessary to do it all locally, too! And yet... I couldn't find a better offering than this.
(Bonus points for anyone working on speech-to-text: give me a quick shortcut to add the string "[(microphone emoji)]" in my messages just to let the other party know that this was transcribed, so that they know to overlook possible mistakes.)
Not just for this article, but from most ideas/articles around LLMs, I feel like they aren't "thinking with portals" enough. We have "portal gun" tech (or at least, that's what's being marketed), and we're using it as better doors.
A recommendation engine that looks at my browsing history, sees what blog posts or articles I spent the most time on, then searches the web every night for things I should be reading that I’m not.
This kind of exists in the form of ChatGPT Pulse. It uses your ChatGPT history rather than your browser history, but that's probably just as good a source for people interested in using it (e.g. people who use ChatGPT enough to want it to recommend things to them.) https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-pulse/
There's some sort of fundamental category mistake going on with thinking like this.
Most of the items in this list fall prey to it, but it is maybe best exemplified by this one:
> A writing app that lets you “request a critique” from a bunch of famous writers. What would Hemingway say about this blog post? What did he find confusing? What did he like?
Any app that ever claimed to tell you what "Hemingway would say about this blog post" would evidently be lying — it'd be giving you what that specific AI model generates in response to such a prompt. 100 models would give you 100 answers, and none of them could claim to actually "say what Hemingway would've said". It's not as if Hemingway's entire personality and outlooks are losslessly encoded into the few hundreds of thousands of words of writing/speech transcripts we have from him, and can be reconstructed by a sufficiently beefy LLM.
So in effect it becomes an exercise of "can you fool the human into thinking this is a plausible thing Hemingway would've said".
The reason why you would care to hear Hemingway's thought on your writing, or Steve Jobs' thoughts on your UI design, is precisely because they are the flesh-and-bone, embodied versions of themselves. Anything else is like trying to eat a picture of a sandwich to satisfy your hunger.
There's something unsettling that so many people cannot seem to cut clearly through this illusion.
2. is already possible with Claude Code + context files + the Playwright MCP, or?
7. also seems possible with any markdown editor, e.g. Obsidian, plus an AI running through the local files such as Claude Code.
13. I would love this as well! We will probably see this soon, especially on more open platforms such as BlueSky, as its seems to be a better fit for customizable browser extensions and customizable feed experiences.
14. How is this different from what AI can already do? Especially with iterative sub-agents that that can store context in files it's quite capable already. But of course, quality can always be better, but is that the only thing?
Also a few ideas seem to be close to what I'm building ( https://dailyselftrack.com/ ). Idea is to have a customizable tool so you can track what you want, and then you can feed that data into AIs if you choose to do so to get feedback.
This Chrome extension does 13. Semantic filters for Twitter/X/YouTube. I want to be able to write open-ended filters like “hide any tweet that will likely make me angry” and never have my feed show me rage-bait again. By shaping our feeds we shape ourselves.
Uses localLLM to hide posts based on your prompt. "Block rage bait" is one excellent use. The quality, however, depends on the model you are using, and in turn depends what GPU you have
This chrome extension does: 13. Semantic filters for Twitter/X/YouTube. I want to be able to write open-ended filters like “hide any tweet that will likely make me angry” and never have my feed show me rage-bait again. By shaping our feeds we shape ourselves.
It hides content on X/ Reddit (more sites coming soon) based on your instructions. Speed and quality depends on the model you are using however, since it currently only supports local LLMs
> A hybrid of Strong (the lifting app) and ChatGPT where the model has access to my workouts, can suggest improvements, and coach me. I mainly just want to be able to chat with the model knowing it has detailed context for each of my workouts (down to the time in between each set).
> A paint-by-number filmmaking app. I want to be able to brainstorm an idea for a short film in the app, have the model create a detailed storyboard, and then I just need to use my phone to film each of the storyboarded shots. Kind of like training wheels for making movies.
There are at least half a dozen apps for that.[1][2]
There are other apps for creating the shots, too. Those are still not that great, but it's getting there. You could probably previz a whole movie right now.
Currently trying to build #6. Just for private use. My hope is that by throwing a bunch of highly personalized information in a VLM it will provide reasonably first estimates. (E.g. if you see a bowl lentils I will probably have rice below etc.). And then iterate on the main ingredients -> fetch the macros of main ingredients from a DB. If its within 20% that would be enough for me.
I have tried some off-the-shelfe solutions and they currently do not seem to cut it, or are too complex for my use case.
> A local screen recording app but it uses local models to create detailed semantic summaries of what I’m doing each day on my computer. This should then be provided as context for a chat app. I want to ask things like “Who did I forget to respond to yesterday?” I've been using Rewind for a year now, and it's nowhere near as useful as it should be.
I am building something like this but unfortunately not local because for most people's machines local LLMs are just not powerful enough or would take too much drain on battery. Work in progress, always curious for feedback! https://donethat.ai
iOS solves this problem by deferring processing until your phone is plugged in an locked. So it can sit there with full resources available to do whatever without impacting the user.
Those are not 28 ideas, those are 4-5 ideas rehashed. Generally, I want a personal fitness/wellness assistant, an artistic assistant, a search assistant, a random thoughts assistant, and an assistant to manage the assistants. The author wants for the ai to know what they want before they've wanted it and to serve them a suitable menu of choices to preserve the illusion that they are in control. I'm not sure that I'd sign under such a vision, but people want different things.
On 12: I see a more general product that allows you to amass as much personal data from any of your devices for use as future chat context as inevitable. We see early notions of this in Microsoft’s Recall and the new Pulse. Hopefully someone will build a great local first/open source version and it’ll probably be the first time I actively choose to use such software over the equivalent cloud offering! Don’t want Sam Altman seeing my browser history
As someone who is regularly involved in startup valuations, I think there’s quite a few million-dollar ideas in there—if not as standalone products, then at least as differentiation features for existing categories.
I recently gave one of my teen kids Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age to read, and we’ve both been commenting on how much smarter some “things” could be instead of everyone churning out a slightly different way to “chat with your data and be locked in to our platform”.
And I think this is why I’m so partial to Apple’s slow, progressive, under the covers integration of ML into its platform-input prediction, photo processing, automatic tagging, etc. we don’t necessarily need LLMs for a lot of the things that would improve computer experiences.
Some of the suggestions might be useful if they could be made not so wasteful energy-wise; some indicate the author's false perceptions of what LLMs and transformater models do; and some are frightening from a mass-surveillance and other perspectives.
> a chat app grounded by nutrition databases. Just minimize the cognitive effort it takes me to log a meal.
I think this is a great idea for an user interface. While inputting information, the user would have to enter some jumbled thoughts, the precise rows and columns would be handled by the AI
49 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 63.1 ms ] threadI don't understand why Google, Brave, or Mozilla are not building this. This already exists in a centralized form like X's timeline for posts, but it could exist for the entire web. From a business standpoint, being able to show ads on startup or after just a click, is less friction than requiring someone to have something in mind they want to search and type it.
Companies are already doing this so you can chat with the "author": https://www.wired.com/story/why-read-books-when-you-can-use-...
Isn’t this just a chrome extension that sends data back and forth with chat gpt token?
A hybrid of Strong (the lifting app) and ChatGPT where the model has access to my workouts, can suggest improvements, and coach me. I mainly just want to be able to chat with the model knowing it has detailed context for each of my workouts (down to the time in between each set).
Strong really transformed my gym progression, I feel like its autopilot for the gym. BUT I have 4x routines I rotate through (I'll often switch it up based on equipment availability), but I'm sure an integrated AI coach could optimize.
The voice recognition capabilities of Google Speech Services, which is what the mic button hooks into, suck. Meanwhile, Voxtral (and Whisper) understand what I'm trying to say far better, they automatically "edit out" any stuttering or stammering that I might have, and they properly capitalize and include punctuation. And they handle being bilingual exceedingly well, including, for example, using English words in the middle of French sentences.
The best solution I could find so far is this F-Droid app that uses Whisper : https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.woheller69.whisperplus/
But it has some downsides. First, I have to manually switch to that different keyboard; thankfully my Samsung phone offers an easy switch shortcut any time a keyboard is on screen, so it only requires 3 taps... and thankfully it's smart enough to send me back to Swiftkey once it's done. Second, only 30 seconds... sometimes I ramble on for longer. Third, the way it's designed kind of sucks: you either have to hold a button (even though the point of speech-to-text is that I don't have to hold anything down) or let automatic detection end the recording and start processing, in which case it often cuts me off if I take more than 1 second thinking about my next words.
This is arguably one of the biggest use cases of modern AI technology and the least controversial one; phones have the hardware necessary to do it all locally, too! And yet... I couldn't find a better offering than this.
(Bonus points for anyone working on speech-to-text: give me a quick shortcut to add the string "[(microphone emoji)]" in my messages just to let the other party know that this was transcribed, so that they know to overlook possible mistakes.)
This kind of exists in the form of ChatGPT Pulse. It uses your ChatGPT history rather than your browser history, but that's probably just as good a source for people interested in using it (e.g. people who use ChatGPT enough to want it to recommend things to them.) https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-pulse/
Most of the items in this list fall prey to it, but it is maybe best exemplified by this one:
> A writing app that lets you “request a critique” from a bunch of famous writers. What would Hemingway say about this blog post? What did he find confusing? What did he like?
Any app that ever claimed to tell you what "Hemingway would say about this blog post" would evidently be lying — it'd be giving you what that specific AI model generates in response to such a prompt. 100 models would give you 100 answers, and none of them could claim to actually "say what Hemingway would've said". It's not as if Hemingway's entire personality and outlooks are losslessly encoded into the few hundreds of thousands of words of writing/speech transcripts we have from him, and can be reconstructed by a sufficiently beefy LLM.
So in effect it becomes an exercise of "can you fool the human into thinking this is a plausible thing Hemingway would've said".
The reason why you would care to hear Hemingway's thought on your writing, or Steve Jobs' thoughts on your UI design, is precisely because they are the flesh-and-bone, embodied versions of themselves. Anything else is like trying to eat a picture of a sandwich to satisfy your hunger.
There's something unsettling that so many people cannot seem to cut clearly through this illusion.
7. also seems possible with any markdown editor, e.g. Obsidian, plus an AI running through the local files such as Claude Code.
13. I would love this as well! We will probably see this soon, especially on more open platforms such as BlueSky, as its seems to be a better fit for customizable browser extensions and customizable feed experiences.
14. How is this different from what AI can already do? Especially with iterative sub-agents that that can store context in files it's quite capable already. But of course, quality can always be better, but is that the only thing?
Also a few ideas seem to be close to what I'm building ( https://dailyselftrack.com/ ). Idea is to have a customizable tool so you can track what you want, and then you can feed that data into AIs if you choose to do so to get feedback.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/takeback-content-fi...
Uses localLLM to hide posts based on your prompt. "Block rage bait" is one excellent use. The quality, however, depends on the model you are using, and in turn depends what GPU you have
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/takeback-content-fi...
It hides content on X/ Reddit (more sites coming soon) based on your instructions. Speed and quality depends on the model you are using however, since it currently only supports local LLMs
> A hybrid of Strong (the lifting app) and ChatGPT where the model has access to my workouts, can suggest improvements, and coach me. I mainly just want to be able to chat with the model knowing it has detailed context for each of my workouts (down to the time in between each set).
here: https://j4.coach/
Still early, have ~30 min per day to work on it but it's usable and improving every week :)
There are at least half a dozen apps for that.[1][2]
There are other apps for creating the shots, too. Those are still not that great, but it's getting there. You could probably previz a whole movie right now.
[1] https://ltx.studio/platform/ai-storyboard-generator
[2] https://ezboard.ai/
I have tried some off-the-shelfe solutions and they currently do not seem to cut it, or are too complex for my use case.
> A local screen recording app but it uses local models to create detailed semantic summaries of what I’m doing each day on my computer. This should then be provided as context for a chat app. I want to ask things like “Who did I forget to respond to yesterday?” I've been using Rewind for a year now, and it's nowhere near as useful as it should be.
I am building something like this but unfortunately not local because for most people's machines local LLMs are just not powerful enough or would take too much drain on battery. Work in progress, always curious for feedback! https://donethat.ai
If you want fully local, somebody did a post on HN on something related recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45361268
This is a video of me "vibe-coding" a userscript that adds a darkmode toggle to hacker news: https://screen.studio/share/r0wb8jnQ
The actual purpose of the vibe-coding userscripts feature is to vibe code WebMCP servers that the extension can then use for browser automation tasks.
Everything is still very WIP, but I can give you beta access if you want to play around with it
I recently gave one of my teen kids Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age to read, and we’ve both been commenting on how much smarter some “things” could be instead of everyone churning out a slightly different way to “chat with your data and be locked in to our platform”.
And I think this is why I’m so partial to Apple’s slow, progressive, under the covers integration of ML into its platform-input prediction, photo processing, automatic tagging, etc. we don’t necessarily need LLMs for a lot of the things that would improve computer experiences.
Some of the suggestions might be useful if they could be made not so wasteful energy-wise; some indicate the author's false perceptions of what LLMs and transformater models do; and some are frightening from a mass-surveillance and other perspectives.
I think this is a great idea for an user interface. While inputting information, the user would have to enter some jumbled thoughts, the precise rows and columns would be handled by the AI