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Show HN: Sidekins – Your new social and work companion (sidekins.com)

1 points by 18kage ↗ HN
I'm a small indie developer, I've made a mac app called Sidekins It is a small desktop character that you can design yourself(I call it a Kin/Sidekin) and it lives around your screen and peeps from the side when not in use.

The platform is social, so you can add your friends to it and your kin runs it for you. You can ask it to "become Michael Jackson and go do moonwalk" on your friends desktop or just about anything...

You can also ask it to help you "guide" through your mac, or any app, it moves and points around telling you how things work. There is also a "do" mode, this actually does things for you on your mac, like play this song on Spotify or add an iPhone 16 to my amazon cart.

design your own kin and watch the demos: www.sidekins.com

Currently, it works on Mac with apple silicon

Try it out, and connect with me on the app: @18kushaljain

8 comments

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octantes
I don't have a mac but seems like a fun concept! I remember loving the pepsiman pet as a kid
18kage
Hehe, it is very fun to be honest, it's much than just a pet. I use it to chat and disturb my friends and have started using it to do things on my mac handsfree.

never thought I'd make something so fun and useful and get hooked to it myself.

P.S. don't worry I'll make it available for non mac users soon, it's just the start

octantes
great! will be following it then
verdverm
this is like infinite scroll, cool tech thing, disastrous for humanity in the long run (ai companions broadly)
18kage
I'm very much in favor of your idea, but this product is not that, this is just a very powerful tool with a funny face on it. The idea of Sidekins is not to just give you company and listen to you, it is actually meant to get things done and make talking to real people more fun.

I added the social angle to it because L never wanted to give people an AI companion which will just validate their feelings and isolate them, rather use AI to make an assistant that can help taking to friends more fun.

for example, I regularly ask my kin to go to my friends screen and do a fart animation and make a prrrrr sound, it irritates them and gives me joy, haha

verdverm
the copy on the homepage contradicts this comment
18kage
which one? "A companion that lives on your Mac and hangs out with your friends’ sidekins." I call it a companion because it lives right on your screen like cute little person. It does make your interaction with friends much for fun, think of it like an emoji you'd add to your message to express yourself, with sidekins you can send a whole character expressing and doing stuff on their screens + all the work it gets done.

sorry if the message is not clear, I can reword it, hehe.

Do check out the demos on the website, that'll probably give a better picture.

Trust me, farting on your friends screen could only bring good to society ;)

verdverm
like almost all of it?

I would invite you to read Artificial Intimacy by Sherry Turkle and then reflect on what this can do to people.

> and get hooked to it myself (from peer comment)

Avoid building emotional attachment to ai software. Do not have it talk with the voice of real people, or at all. It messes with our brains and being in ways we do not fully comprehend yet.