There’s a lot of hype around AI these days, and it’s easy to believe that it’s just another tech world fad like the Metaverse or crypto. I think that AI is different though, because the real-world impact doesn’t require a leap of faith to imagine. For example, I’ve had a long-time dream of being able to look at a lamp, say “On”, and have the light come on. I want to be able to just ask everyday objects for help and have them do something intelligent.

To make it easier to understand what I’m talking about, we’ve built a small box that understands when you’re looking at it, can make sense of spoken language, and set it up to control a lamp. We’ve designed it to work as simply as possible:

• There’s no wake word like “Alexa” or “Siri”. You trigger the interaction by looking at the lamp, using a Person Sensor to detect that gaze.
• We don’t require a set order of commands, we’re able to pick out what you want from a stream of natural speech using our AI models.
• Everything is running locally on the controller box. This means that not only is all your data private, it never leaves your home, but there’s also no setup needed. You don’t have to download an app, connect to wifi, or even create an account. Plug in the controller and lamp, and it Just Works.

All of this is only possible because of the new wave of transformer models that are sweeping the world. We’re going to see a massive number of new capabilities like this enter our everyday lives, not in years but in months. If you’re interested in how this kind of local, private intelligence (with no server costs!) could work with your products, I’d love to chat.