00:00 Speaker A
Dan, what the hell is Sam Altman building?
00:03 Dan
Well, this seems like some kind of high-end smart speaker. Oh, and there are likely moving parts. It comes with batteries so you should be able to carry it from room to room. Well, the big thing to do with that is to make it more personalized. It runs on top of ChatT, can leverage your personal context, and can have a companion-like aspect of sorts using ChaT’s new audio improvements through ChaT Live. Oh, so, you know, it looks like it’s going in this direction. It won’t be a smartphone replacement at first glance, but more like living in your home. However, I think you can carry it with you if you need to. Well, that does raise some questions. Why do we need this when we have Amazon’s Echo, or when Google has its own smart home capabilities and obviously has Gemini added to it? Amazon has updated Alexa with Alexa Plus. Well, it’s clearly not ChatT, but that doesn’t mean similar features don’t exist. And we’ve seen moving or moveable smart speakers in the past that track you via camera. I think it will take quite a while for this to really explode in the consumer space. Remember, just because it has the ChaT name on it doesn’t automatically mean it’s a hot seller. Well, look at Apple’s Homepods. It wasn’t like knocking people’s socks off. Um, they’re made by Apple, but uh, it looks like they’re somehow still around now, uh, almost, hey, we still have this, we’re still kind of an Apple product in this space.
02:40 Speaker A
So why does Sam Altman feel he needs hardware? What are the financial or strategic benefits? You know, open AI? They feel like, listen, we need to own the customer relationship directly. is that so?
03:07 Dan
Yes, I think that’s what it comes down to. Well, of course you can use Chat GT through the app and also from your web browser. Well, you can use it now through this speaker. If you have an iPhone and need to do something in an app or run a specific command, why would you offload that task to a secondary app like ChatBT instead of doing it directly through your iPhone? Yes, ChatBT is now available on iPhone. Well, you can ask Siri a question. Then say, Excuse me, I’d like to ask Siri a question, or I’d like to ask ChatBT a question. But you know, if the new version of Siri is good enough, why should you switch? So what we’re saying is, we need to get into the hardware space. That way we become the default option and people will want to use us instead of creating the extra friction of having to open a secondary app to access us.
