“So tell me about yourself.” For some, it’s a dreaded phrase that ruins blind dates or job interviews from the get-go. Haven’t you ever wanted to have a little AI assistant in your ear that would give you the right lines to say in any social setting? A Stanford student has designed just that: a way to use ChatGPT and an AR monocle to act as your very own Cortana, helping you through your everyday life as if you were Master Chief.
Brian Hau-Ping Chang (opens in new tab) (spotted by Tom’s Hardware (opens in new tab)) created a prototype digital assistant that he calls “an operating system for your whole life.” Speech recognition software listens to your conversation, relays it to ChatGPT, and spits out a response that appears on the lens of an open-source AR monocle (opens in new tab) which clips onto your glasses. It can even recognize the faces of the people you’re talking to.
Brian posted a series of tweets illustrating the prototype’s capabilities. The technology goes by several playful names, such as lifeOS or rizzGPT, but it all does roughly the same thing. In one case, it scans your friends’ faces and then “brings up relevant details to talk about based on your texts with them.” It’s all presented somewhat lightheartedly, but it’s not hard to imagine that this kind of technology will actually be used someday in an AI assistant that can scan a stranger’s face, identify it, and extract facts and topics of conversation based on their social media posts.
This would get you instant icebreakers, assuming you can get past the whole “scanning people’s faces without their consent”, you don’t mind interacting with other people via a proxy language model, and the lag isn’t so great that you stand there and you stare at them and wait for your monocle to spit out relevant information.
meet lifeOS: an operating system for your whole life 🌐a personal AI agent delivered directly through AR smart glasses 👓uses computer vision to 👁️recognize👁️ your friends’ faces, then brings up relevant details to talk about based on of your text messages with them (memory🤯 ) pic.twitter.com/BgCuODV4k2April 10, 2023
In another use, the AI assistant helps in choosing a a meal in a restaurant (opens in new tab) by analyzing the menu and quickly making a recommendation based on the user’s historical taste preferences. But the best example I’ve seen of this technology in action is during the mock job interview (opens in new tab)where he answers the interviewer’s questions with appropriate (though not necessarily correct) answers.
However, there is a rather long delay in getting responses, causing awkward silences, and the text on the screen seems a bit hard to read. And this prototype monocle isn’t what you’d call discreet, either. Apple’s planned AR glasses (opens in new tab) might provide something more modern (although Google Glass didn’t particularly take off and creeped people out too), but if you can put a monocle on your sunglasses, more power to you.
Reminds me of that scene in Spider-Man: Far From Home where Peter Parker gets a pair of AI powered AR glasses (opens in new tab). But instead of spying on your friends and flying deadly drones, you can be reminded that a colleague recently went on vacation, which is a lot less exciting. More practical, I guess.
Chang is asking the community about other situations where they can try out the technology. I have one suggestion: give me the best answers for getting out of a speeding ticket.