This article boils down to “man enables feature, is slightly surprised when feature functions.”
Ars is usually better than this. Disappointing
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To be fair the ‘dystopian’ quote is from the guy that got broken up with, not ARS’ article writer.
I don’t think that’s the part they took issue with.
For some reason the author is trying to equate it to an “AI-Mediated breakup” which…doesn’t make sense, a summary of something is not “mediating”
Mediating would be like having the AI write and deliver a breakup text, simply summarizing it isn’t
Is an AI summary of a text message really something you need? I’d have thought a typical text would be short enough to not require it.
A text, no
Texts, maybe
Phone calls/voicemails OMG LIBERATE ME PLEASE
Getting a transcript of a voicemail sent to me would be an incredible feature actually.
iPhones have this, but so does Google voice- and you can use Google voice as your voicemail for any carrier pretty seamlessly, too.
iPhone has had this since iOS 17, and my Samsung has had this feature for a while too. Not sure about other androids, but you probably just need to enable it.
Tmobile does it as a service but it’s a paid one and inconsistent in accuracy. I had it for free as part of a plan for a while and told them no thanks to an additional charge. Not sure it’s worth paying $5/month.
That would work out to roughly $10 per voicemail for me.
I haven’t found any voicemail services I really like, so I’m thinking of building my own thing using Twilio and OpenAI. Call comes in, Twilio calls webhook on my server, server opens connection to OpenAI using their new streaming API, sends call to OpenAI to build transcript in real time, uses OpenAI to summarize transcript and extract the person’s name, number, and the reason for the call, sends me an email with the contents and a copy of the message attached.
Just an idea at the moment.
Google Voice is much easier. Just enable the settings for voicemail transcription and an email sent with the transcription.
But then you have Google listening to all your calls. It’s a tradeoff
I think the intended use case is summarising a series of messages, not just one
“About a week later right out of the blue she sends me a John Deere letter… Yeah I called her. She gave me a bunch of crap about not listening to her enough. I dunno. I wasn’t really paying attention.”
That John Denver’s full of shit man
I think a John Deere letter may be different.
“I do feel like it added a level of distance to it that wasn’t a bad thing,” he told Ars Technica. “Maybe a bit like a personal assistant who stays professional and has your back even in the most awful situations, but yeah, more than anything it felt unreal and dystopian.”
If the single word “dystopian” is how the editors decided to summarize that description, I’m not sure they’re doing any better than the AI.
Dystopia is when optional feature is enabled
We reached out to Spreen directly via email and he delivered his own summary of his girlfriend’s messages. “It was something along the lines of i can’t believe you just did that, we’re done, i want my stuff. we had an argument in a bar and I got up and left, then she sent the text,” he wrote.
How did he feel about getting the news via AI summary? “I do feel like it added a level of distance to it that wasn’t a bad thing,” he told Ars Technica. “Maybe a bit like a personal assistant who stays professional and has your back even in the most awful situations, but yeah, more than anything it felt unreal and dystopian.”
This really is just more funny than anything else to me. Sucks it was on his birthday, though.
So the complaint here is that Apple’s AI summary… Accurately and succinctly summarised his messages, as he requested?
“She found the Tinder messages; you’re cooked bro”
