HACKER Q&A
📣 daddyodevil

What is your vision about a digital assistant with some ML/DL/NLP?


When I think of AI-enabled digital assistant, I can foresee the following possibilities and workings(this is based on what I know I can develop):

0. Open source and self hosted.

1. The main crux of the whole system is a auto populating database with an intelligent retrieval system.

1. You will have a main server at one location, in this case, let's say your house.

2. This system has to have enough storage, say around 2TB.

3. Whatever you do throughout the day in your devices that you want to keep a log of or want to remember like blogs or papers you read, videos you watch, songs you listen to, the code that you type, or the documents that you type, etc etc will be saved in that server.

4. This can be achieved by something similar to either a screen reader or some other form of capture methodology.

5. These will be auto-categorised based on words present with some added context and then chunked and saved as vectors for similarity search.

6. Now when you are doing something, you can quickly check if you have previously encountered something similar.

7. The server can be connected to any device with a client, with something like Tailscale.

8. The actual client can be a simple search results page or some sort of chat.

9. When you are doing something that has a previous related entry, when the client will try to save this new items, you can request it to show previous entries.

This idea came to me a few hours back. A youtube video popped in my recommendations about a guy trying all the various kinds of sushi. That made me think, even if I watch this video, and someday I go to a sushi place, I will likely forget that I had ever watched such a video, let alone remembering what the various kinds of sushi are. Some AI assistant like the one I have mentioned above can come in handy, as when I book the reservation, or get in the restaurant, I can get a notification about a previous entry in my database about this video and read a 1 min summary of it.

With clever ways to structure the data coming in, I think this can also be used in more ways than just storing and retrieving a day to day log.

What do you guys think of such a tool, and what would you change or add to it?

  👤 syndicatedjelly Accepted Answer ✓
I was hoping for this 6 months ago, but between all the AI services available now, I don't feel the need to have this all in a central place. It's all still so new, so if one services starts sucking, it's to switch to a new one. I learned my lesson the first time around by trusting a large amount of my digital life to Google/Apple, and getting burned when they deprecate a feature I like or make my data impossible to export.

Then again, I'm growing curmudgeony and ossified in my ways, so maybe this idea is useful to other people who haven't lost their faith in centralized services yet.