I want this, but very concerned about the security and privacy - you're talking about getting my most personal of personals (email, calendar, messages, phone calls). This could be a nightmare of privacy or security breaches. That's why I'm likely waiting for Apple's version within their corporate security and privacy commitments (and they already have my data).
I don't see anything on the website about SOC2, or privacy commitments beyond a boilerplate policy?
Thanks for leaving the comment! We totally understand your concerns, and you're not alone! We ourselves are very privacy sensitive, and never liked the idea of hardware devices always listening to us. And, as you said, our integrations are dealing with the most personal of personal information.
We recently got our CASA Tier-2 compliance done (Cloud Application Security Assessment). We've also gone through Google's OAuth compliance process for every new integration we add that's related to Google. These assessments scan our app and make sure that our software meets pretty stringent standards when it comes to data security and encryption, and that we're not using the data for anything other than the specific features we promise (i.e. not sharing or selling to advertisers, etc.). You can read more about CASA here (https://appdefensealliance.dev/casa). We haven't gone through SOC2 yet, but planning on soon once we have a few more integrations.
This really doesn't say much though. What specific measures are in place to ensure user privacy and data protection?
Does personal information get sent to OpenAI or Claude as part of the functionality? Can users request deletion of their data, and if so, what is the process? Are there specific protocols in place to ensure security? (i.e. Do you use encryption at rest?).
> What specific measures are in place to ensure user privacy and data protection?
Unless you intend to personally audit their code, I'd argue it couldn't possibly matter. Even businesses like Apple publish all kinds of documentation that belies the reality of their infrastructure. The iMessage Security Overview doesn't mention the NSA's retention period for encrypted communique; the push notification documentation doesn't tell you about the government middleman processing each alert.
You either trust people blindly, or you validate them personally. Getting a pinkie-promise about privacy from the CEO is worth absolutely nothing in real-world security terms.
> We want to ensure that security and privacy researchers can inspect Private Cloud Compute software, verify its functionality, and help identify issues — just like they can with Apple devices.
So... in Apple's own words, they are allowed to cherry-pick who's allowed to read their code and audit their privacy, in the same way they strategically deny researchers the ability to audit certain iOS features.
Microsoft and OpenAI aren’t even providing users with services with any actual confidential compute architecture. You actually need to trust them, but they don’t even claim to do what apple does, so you would need to hallucinate they are making promises they aren’t and believe THAT, and also hope they aren’t hacked or served with a warrant. It’s a different matter with what Apple is doing.
A different matter without distinction. Apple is equally as unaccountable as OpenAI and Microsoft, their only difference is their usual marketing strategy that the industry never took seriously in the first place. If it came out that they were sending the NSA all of your "private" LLM requests (like what happened with push notifications[0]), Apple would just sheepishly admit it and continue advertising their same security-oriented shtick. They're shameless.
We don't know what those logs will tell us, and if it was designed with privacy in mind it shouldn't say much. Binary software images also don't tell us what the binary is doing, similar to how having all of the iOS files doesn't give you insight into how the OS was programmed. If the server source was fully open source and each machine could attest it was running an unmodified binary, then we might have a level of accountability. As-is, this is no better than Apple's "Trust me, bro" mindset they exercise securing iOS and MacOS.
I feel like messaging around trust is completely missing. Think of hiring a human assistant with this level of access to your life—someone who knows everything about you and can act and speak on your behalf. You'd want strong answers to (1) can they perform this role and (2) can I trust them to know everything about me and speak and act on my behalf. That's a high bar!
As you develop your messaging, I wanted to share the questions I had as I think a lot of users will ask the same:
1. What powers Martin? Is it a custom LLM or powered by OpenAI, Anthropic?
2. Is any of my data ever used in training?
3. Will I always be notified before new texts / calls / actions are taken on my behalf? Does the AI present as me or are my contacts aware that it's an AI assistant that may provide incorrect information?
4. Can I easily and quickly remove all my data and context?
I’m impressed. I’ll probably cancel ChatGPT Pro subscription and switch to this. It actually does what I want.
I’ve been putting it through its paces and it’s handling some complicated requests correctly the first time. For example:
“There is an art festival in my city this weekend. They have a jazz stage my wife and I would like to check out. Find the schedule for each day and create one event every day it’s happening. In the event description put the schedule for each day, and invite my wife.”
It got it right the first time. Pretty amazing.
I see some folks saying it’s just a “wrapper for an LLM” like that’s easy to do. LLMs are not faerie powder that just work for every use case. The personal assistant use case is extremely difficult, which is why the big players haven’t done it yet.
So bravo for the bravado and actually making it work. Privacy is a concern, but honestly I’m not that worried that you can find out which art festival I’ll be at this weekend. But an oncology appointment? I might.
You should create a system where you cannot access user data, and it can never be shared with third parties. Make that system open source to prove it. Give up the potential upside of using this data for revenue so that Martin becomes what it can be. Otherwise, I’ll never feel confident telling Martin anything I don’t want advertisers to know.
Thanks for the comment! Glad to hear Martin stood up to the test!
We can certainly publish more privacy guarantees in the future - thanks for the suggestions. Our business model is subscriptions, so we won't be going anywhere near ads or data sharing.
How do you make yourself future proof from Apple? Apple can just making Siri smarter and add integrations with tons of other softwares, apps, and hardwares?
Apple’s strength and weakness is that there is only one Apple way to do things for ease of use and for it to “just work”. However, not everyone fits into their cookie cutter design regardless of how good it is. Customization and options beyond what Apple does tends to be the way to go.
The idea that the community invented a control panel, notifications, coloured icons, the ability to turn cellular, delete previous calls etc is pretty laughable.
Not saying they invented them. Indeed many of these were initially cribbed from android perhaps. But still, curious indeed how many of them go from popularly installed jailbreak tweak right into a very similar looking and functioning iOS feature a few updates later.
I read somewhere that 100% of YC winter 2023 branch had an AI angle which was really sad to read. You have the most well respected and exclusive VC and its investing in mostly companies that are thin wrappers and integrations around an LLM they don't own.
Your mistake was assuming YC cares about "true" value and not (a chance of) monetary success. YC may look all nice and have a decent PR team (and some/many people may genuinely be nice folks) but they're just a business at the end of the day.
Besides the obvious privacy concerns, I'm worried about dangers from it being invoked by someone else within voice range. I've always thought that's why the current Siri has limited abilities.
I'm sure it won't be long before we see apps that listen, record any "Hey Siri" they hear, and then synthesize that voice to give your phone commands to "tell me my passwords", or more insidious and difficult-to-detect commands.
It seems Apple's new version will be facing this problem too.
I already have one or two false positives a day where Siri will mistakenly trigger and search for something random on the internet (I have an iPhone, apple watch and homepods, so I guess it's more likely to happen with more devices listening).
This is something I have been so desperately wanting that I thought I would build a hacky version for myself.
- How did you solve the long-term memory problem? What kind of issues are you facing with scaling the number of tools?
- I like the idea but there's one crucial thing missing for me. I will happily pay for your app if it lets me bring my own API keys/ endpoints for models that I can host, so that I know my data is private and secure.
- Right now, we use a combination of RAG and chain of thought for storing memories. At different time intervals, we'll create memories at different levels of granularity. For example, at the end of every conversation, we'll embed some vectors based on specific commands from the user. At the end of each day, we'll have the LLM reflect on key questions related to a user's routine. And every few days, it'll reflect on the user's short/long term goals. This has worked to some degree, but we're still in the very early stages of figuring out how to do long-term memory for an assistant.
- Scaling the number of tools is definitely a struggle since we want to make our integrations as thorough as we can. It takes time, so we just try to keep growing the list consistently. We have an internal goal of adding at least one new major integration every month.
- Love the idea of bringing your own API keys/endpoints. We've gotten this feedback before, so we'll seriously consider it in our next few sprints!
Big fan of Martin personally. One of the few startups I enjoyed and then invested in. Mostly use it for creative brainstorming and talking through ideas. On a morning walk I can cycle through ideas and when I get back to my laptop I have a bunch of research done. Team has been cranking for a while so looking forward to the updates.
As someone who is very interested in using this, may I make two suggestions:
1. Have a list of integrations somewhere on the homepage. It might be there, but if so I missed it. I immediately wanted to know if it can integrate with Obsidian, for example, or Omnifocus. I'm sure others will want to know if "email" means Google only, or Outlook, etc.
2. Make the trial longer. When I see 7 days, what I immediately think is "not enough time to really test this". I'm a busy person, I'm not going to change habits overnight, and unless this thing will immediately integrate into my daily routine (it won't), I'll probably only use it casually the first few times. It would be much better to give me more time to test it. (This is not business advice - maybe I'm wrong and 7 days is better to actually convert users! I'm just giving my immediate reaction.)
Apple has announced basically this on WWDC two months ago (Apple Intelligence), with a multi-tier architecture (on-device, private Apple compute, 3rd party models), a ton of integrations, and a focus on privacy.
My main problem with startups around this is that it’s just a big ask to get access to all my data and store it in their cloud.
It's just baffling. Same goes for Microsoft and how utterly unusable Cortana is, these features should be more than afterthought integrations that limp along because they're too cheap to get rid of. The slow "evolution" of voice assistants is pretty much ensuring that nobody wants to use them, at least among the people I know that own smartphones. Something tells me that AI won't be the selling point Apple thinks it is, especially when anyone with a web browser can use ChatGPT for free.
I’ve read through Apple’s Intelligence architecture and I liked what I saw (context graph on device; how the integrations work; if doing remote inference only sending the relevant parts; the architecture of private compute).
I haven’t upgraded my phone in a while, and this will be the final push for me to get their next phone, personally, and I’ve been using ChatGPT and now Claude from the moment they got to a sensible level.
That all of them are taking their sweet time with this makes me think it was just hard to get something production-ready out that will work for 99% of the population well.
> and this will be the final push for me to get their next phone, personally
So let me get this straight. You want AI features, but not the ChatGPT 4o functionality you can go use for free right now. You intend to upgrade to one of the Pro phones (the only ones guaranteed to get local AI functionality) for subpar AI functionality and less freedom to select an LLM that works for you?
I don't get it. Since WWDC I've heard so much contradiction around what people want from Apple AI. Maybe I'm misinformed, but I think it's absolute nonsense that someone would trust OpenAI only when Apple is the middleman. I certainly know the majority of smartphone customers couldn't care less.
Apple Intelligence is an on-device LLM backed by a private Apple hosted LLM. So it has access to your private data and is designed to provide capabilities that can leverage it e.g. it will have knowledge of all your personal interactions across multiple apps. It is fundamentally a personal experience.
It is completely different from ChatGPT which is a single LLM that is used to provide a public experience. And nothing is stopping you from using Claude, Mistral or any other LLMs through their existing apps.
> And nothing is stopping you from using Claude, Mistral or any other LLMs through their existing apps.
That's what I'm talking about, really. Why would you buy a new iPhone to get functionality you can receive from the App Store?
I can see two reasons. You're either one of the evergreen sycophants that buys into Apple's security theater, or you're an obsessive Apple-maniac that will use any of their products no matter how bad they are. Those are two miniscule audiences, in the market of current and future iPhone owners. You would have to show me market research to convince me that even 5% of iPhone owners fall into either category.
So I'll ask again: does anyone really think an inferior local AI with access to your contacts list is going to drive upgrades? Mind you, in the EU Apple isn't even shipping these features because they have to mysteriously and arbitrarily prevent developers from offering competing AI integrations.
Apple's LLM is not a competitor for ChatGPT, Claude, Mistral etc.
It is an on-device model that has access to all of your private data e.g. health, contacts, mail, photos, messages etc. Something that no other LLM will ever get access to. Which means you can ask highly contextualised questions like "show me the photos I took on my last holiday". Again something no other LLM can do.
And it may not drive upgrades on its own but people asked for a better Siri and Apple unquestionably delivered on it.
> Something that no other LLM will ever get access to.
Why? There's no technical reason it's impossible. LLMs don't need an internet connection or persistent local storage; Apple could safely run any LLM with personal data in a sandbox denied internet access. Running Llama or Phi on my data is no less secure than Apple's own local models.
Even if Apple does thwart antitrust efforts and becomes the new exclusive offline model provider for iPhone... how does that drive sales? People predisposed to avoid Siri aren't going to be enticed by an AI-powered upgrade, unless they wanted Siri to be wrong more often. These people have access to better LLMs for free, on any device they choose. The only thing Apple can leverage against them is handling the data they store on the device they own... something Apple is very obviously afraid to attempt in markets where they're already scrutinized.
Again, besides the perennial Apple investors I do not know a single iPhone owner that cares about anything you just said.
I think you missed the part that ChatGPT is completely optional in Apple’s architecture. You have to explicitly allow ChatGPT per-prompt if you want to use it. The primary models are on-device and their “private compute“.
Importantly, I have a fair bit of trust towards OpenAI, but I’m not willing to share the details of half my digital life with them.
After reading Apple’s Intelligence architecture, I feel fairly comfortable with having it use the data from all my various apps for context.
> After reading Apple’s Intelligence architecture, I feel fairly comfortable with having it use the data from all my various apps for context.
I would take those whitepapers with a grain of salt if I were you. Apple's documentation has been known for redacting certain... details, per the request of the US government. Plus, it's not like you or I can go audit the tech (or even the code) and confirm it's the same as in the documentation.
Then again, I trust OpenAI and Apple both as far as I can throw them. Maybe it is me being overly discriminate about what I consider secure and not.
Please. Don't mention apple and AI in the same sentance. Siri is worse than zero, it is utterly absolutely useless. And to partner with OpenAI. They have to get their S** in order here and fast, but if I put out a product like Siri I would be INSANELY embarrassed. If I was a trillion-dollar company and did, I would resign in discrace.
They move slow. Smaller folks can move fast. "Sherlocked" potential is high, but on the bright side, could move the needle on open source capabilities in this space (if they can do, someone else can do). A rising tide lifts all boats. And it is great PR regardless for the folks building from a portfolio perspective if they have to pivot or move on to other endeavors.
Because if TECH GIANT gets this sort of thing wrong (CCPA,GDPR,ePR, anti-trust, <add acronym here>) there is <fine_bigger_than_your_series_C> waiting for them.
They’re planning to update it to use on-device models, their “private compute” models, and optionally for certain prompts (with explicit user approval) OpenAI models.
This is not directly in contradiction to what you said, but I feel like there’s a lot of confusion around this.
Apple wants their shit to be tight. They cannot release stuff that hallucinates.
I am guessing its against their philosophy to release product that only works sometimes from the get go. Thats why they have been so demure about whole AI stuff.
On your homepage you have the call to action that goes to a Stripe page, but no real indication that it's an iOS-only application. If I was an excited Android user and went through the payment process only to find out it doesn't have an Android app I'd be very annoyed.
Anyway, a few thoughts...
1. I find the event planning stuff to be kind of stale. Like maybe it will be cool this time, but so far it's part of every demo and concept around AI assistants and it's never ACTUALLY been cool. I wish this was trying to be cool in a new way.
2. The turn-taking for voice input looks kind of awkward. I get why it has to be that way, and there's not really a better solution, but... well, maybe it would be possible to use visual output and voice input, or generally make them complement each other. Many details are better to show visually and can be tedious to listen to.
3. I like the patient and attentive secretary model more than the turn-taking chat. The confirmation turn-taking is a trust exercise (did the AI _really_ hear and understand what I said?) but I think there's other ways to handle that trust. Like being more trustworthy (modern non-streaming speech recognition works really well!), making things easy to undo, or detecting unlikely commands and require verification.
4. For example, when reviewing a to-do list, I'd rather it show the list and I can just say "yeah, I finished item 1 and 2, and I was able to pick up milk but there's still some other groceries I need to get for tonight" and have it complete and revise entries based on that.
5. Generally to-do and task management is 10x more interesting to me than calendaring. But you should have a theory, not just be a layer over something else. I should be able to break down tasks, complete subtasks, identify partial completion and have it identify the remaining portions, get suggestions on breakdown, get advice on which tasks to complete when, etc.
6. Another interesting thing would be a kind of personal database. I would love to be able to unload a lot of information from my head and know that it will be put someplace where it can be meaningfully retrieved, combined with other data, etc. Like if I have certain bill payments or house maintenance I want to remember or something, I don't want to turn that into calendar items. Lots of them aren't even fully articulated, or the structure will emerge as more information becomes available. But I want to get started before I have carefully defined the task, and an AI assistant could do that.
I like the idea of a more intricate theory for task management. We also don't want to just wrap your calendar. Right now, you can dump a bunch of upcoming tasks to Martin through voice, text, or via a forwarded email. It'll set them as reminders and then bring them up in future syncs to check on progress. It's just a start though, we can definitely make it more complete - i.e. "break down tasks, complete subtasks, identify partial completion and have it identify the remaining portions, get suggestions on breakdown, get advice on which tasks to complete when."
We'll be experimenting a lot and releasing updates to Martin's home screen layout and feed soon! There's a good chance this will come with changes in how we do task management altogether.
Also totally hear you on the personal database idea. We've been toying with similar ideas for a while. Many users already do this with Martin, basically brain dump in a long voice session, and it'll suggest reminders/calendar events for you. We're still figuring out how to display this personal DB info to the user in a UI though, so would love to hear your suggestions.
Hate that you need a credit card to try it. Installed anyway, Martin just crashes. Does not load at all. Fail. iPhone 11, iOS 17.5.1. Location in Australia.
Yes! If you have your Martin send a text to a contact, he'll respond to the contact automatically when they text back. You can track these replies in the app. Our most commonly used integrations are probably reminders and calendar - a lot of users like to sync with Martin in the morning and tell it everything on their schedule today, so they can be reminded throughout the day!
I don't know how these get funded by YC. I have followed YC from the beginning and it seems it funds so many of these startups on the "current thing" these days.
Maybe the founders they are funding are not diverse enough. Is there too much tracking on which universities they went to? So the same set is applying and getting funded?
I personally prefer a UI most of the time. It's higher fidelity and cuts through the inherent ambiguity of language.
The exception for me would be situations where I can't use my hands, like driving. I don't want to have to look at a screen. If a voice agent could replicate the functionality of CarPlay, that would be really useful.
We’re working on getting Martin to work better in the car! You’ll be able to either call him over the phone or use him via CarPlay in the next couple months.
Looks great guys! I'm working specifically on improving voice interfaces too. Maybe I can join you guys to help you out!
Also I feel you, about running into all of the challenges your facing with LLMs. We've run into quiet a few road blocks, but your comments summarises it the best. Just keep working on it step by step.
Thanks! What have been the main LLM/voice challenges you've faced? We're always down to trade notes if helpful! Feel free to email me anytime at dawson@trymartin.com.
I just gave Martin a go. What I'm looking for is an AI PA that can:
- do some research on a given company/individual/website and give me a summary.
- preferably also identify a contact email.
- handle selecting a good time for meetings according to my availability and preferences.
- handle the communication with the other party.
- let me know when it is arranged, or if it's given up.
I signed up and gave it a UK phone number, and got a UK number back for texting Martin. I'm not sure why it has to be SMS when it could be an in-app chat. I was expecting to get a confirmation SMS or similar, but it just accepted it straight away. When I texted the number I was given (several times), it was delivered but there was no reply.
Martin sent me an email welcoming me. I replied asking it to set up a meeting for early next week with another email address. Martin replied saying it is unable to email people on my behalf, and suggested I set it up myself.
> Unfortunately, I am currently unable to send emails to other people on your behalf. However, you can easily send an email to ** to schedule the meeting for early next week in the afternoon.
I reminded Martin that there is an example on the website homepage of doing just that, and it replied saying it can indeed schedule meetings, and asked for the details again. I replied with the same details, and it confirmed the meeting was set up.
I checked my other email, and there was no message setting anything up. I told Martin that the other party needs to know about the email, and it replied with:
> Understood. I'll make sure to inform ** about the meeting details.
Still nothing received. Furthermore, I checked the app and I haven't even connected my calendar, so I'm surprised it didn't warn me or prompt me to do this when I asked for a meeting.
I gave up with that and decided to try something else. I forwarded Martin an email thread from a lead, which included a lot of back story on their organization, offering, and some areas that they think we could potentially collaborate on. I asked Martin to find out more about the company, and evaluate the options for collaboration.
This lead is in the AI space, with their primary product being a document digitisation solution to help surface and discover business documents.
Martin replied describing it as a "nearbound revenue platform to streamline revenue operations", with a key feature being "Automated lead scoring and distribution to prioritize high potential leads". As far as evaluating the collaboration opportunities, it instead gave me a list of collaboration features within the platform, none of which exist.
At the end, it linked to a blog post to their recent funding round. Except, the blog post was from a completely unrelated company with a similar name. Bear in mind that the originally forwarded email was from their business email account, and the body contained multiple links and references to their website.
I decided to try one more test, and asked it to do some research on my own business website and let me know what it finds out. It's been 20 minutes, and I haven't had a reply. I checked the app to see if there was any indication it's working on something for me, but nothing their either.
I love the idea of Martin, but I'll be canceling my trial - it just doesn't seem anywhere near ready yet - especially given I have to trust it to communicate on my behalf.
Thank you for all the feedback! Just wanted to hop on and address a few things.
- I totally resonate with your criteria for an AI PA - this is very much what we're working towards with our email integration. We had been focused on voice for a while, but recently started tackling all the email use cases. Really want to get these right for you!
- Sorry for the poor onboarding job - we should make it more clear that you have to sync your calendar before we send you an email inviting you to send and forward scheduling items to Martin.
- For sending emails to contacts, this is one of our upcoming integrations that we've been building for a while - but just not ready yet! We want to make it able to send/reply to emails and fully act on threads that you attach it to. This means issuing you a unique email address for "your Martin" and managing it's behavior on threads and memory of other contacts. It's a harder problem than we first anticipated, so we're working through it steadily! It should be ready in the next month or so. For now, the communications feature is just limited to texting contacts on your behalf.
- For "deep searches", it definitely isn't the greatest at digging into a topic or generating a thorough briefing for you right now. We're not sure how deep we'll go into this use case in the future, but we do plan on integrating with more specialized functions, like LinkedIn, Twitter, Maps, etc. which should make this a lot better.
Sorry again for the poor onboarding experience. I think we also got an email from you, so will reply there as well to ask for more feedback!
“It definitely isnt the greatest at digging into a topic”
I think this is the greatest drawback to using a tool like this. It does good with the low hanging fruit tasks like responding to a txt. But it does poorly at a loooong range of long tail tasks like conpany research, or summarizing a topic or gathering the latest headlines for a topic, or finding leads or alerting me when someone mentions my brand on Twitter or when someone links to my blog post.
And when soneone tries to do any of those things and gets a bad user experience, theyll give up on your tool
That is what valuable customer feedback looks like. I won't be surprised if Apple uses your feedback for their upcoming Siri. Unfortunately based on this and other feedback here it looks like Martin had a very late launch. Hope this turns into a proper product because we do need a Siri competitor.
for what you're after, my app howie.ai would work well. we don't do nearly as much as Martin does, instead we're narrowly focused on getting the scheduling use case right. i'm a@howie.ai if you want to try it out!
would love this, especially being in the EU where Apple Intelligence fearures might not be released or would need one of the latest devices, but 30$ a month is a big no no for me, i'd rather do my own implementation for a fraction of the price!
If you're capable of doing your own implementation, the cost of the hours of your own labour that you'd spend on it is likely much more than $30/month.
Great to hear you've been tinkering with similar ideas! Would love to try out what you've built too.
Exchange is on our list! Started the Microsoft compliance process a couple months ago - expecting to get support for at least outlook or word rolled out this year.
You can dictate to Martin and have him transcribe for you and send you the notes over email or text, but we don't support directly editing documents yet - though this is coming soon (we're planning to integrate Martin with your Google/Word docs this fall)!
One subscription is worth 2-3 million tokens at retail cost. I doubt the average user even consumes a quarter of that a month even with the RAG overheard.
> * Something else Martin does which is unlike other voice assistants is it can have full text conversations with your contacts on your behalf from its own phone number. For example, you can tell it to plan a lunch with a friend, and it can text back and forth with that friend to figure out a time and place.*
If the contact thought they were talking to me, it would be fucking dystopian. I would immediately break contact with someone who gaslighted me with AI.
Please make some sort of pledge or guarantee that your company will never impersonate a human and that it will always identify itself as a machine when communicating with others.
I totally agree! It would be extremely awkward. Just so that there's never any confusion with the contact, we make sure Martin always starts his texts with "[name of owner]'s Martin here."
On your YC page it lists three founders: Dawson, Harsh and Arjun. But Dawson is the only one listed pretty much everywhere else online. Does this mean the other two founders have quit, and if so I worry about sinking $30 into something which may not exist very soon.
Not trying to be rude, but… how is this a business? Apple is uniquely poised to deliver a solution here. I don’t see how a business could compete with that.
They even announced it during the WWDC this year.
Again, I’m a founder myself. Not trying to poopoo on this. I’m just curious how this idea has legs with all the might of Apple looking poised to crush this.
The YC folks must like you as founders because your business is 100% going to get eaten and you're going to be lucky to get aqui-hired. Get ready to pivot.
unique? hardly. honestly the greentext name raises the likelihood significantly that this is mere astroturfing. i know we should allow benefit of the doubt but it seems hard to believe anyone involved enough in this discussion to post comments is naive enough not to know the possibilities within the LLM space today.
I want this, but very concerned about the security and privacy - you're talking about getting my most personal of personals (email, calendar, messages, phone calls). This could be a nightmare of privacy or security breaches. That's why I'm likely waiting for Apple's version within their corporate security and privacy commitments (and they already have my data). I don't see anything on the website about SOC2, or privacy commitments beyond a boilerplate policy?
Thanks for leaving the comment! We totally understand your concerns, and you're not alone! We ourselves are very privacy sensitive, and never liked the idea of hardware devices always listening to us. And, as you said, our integrations are dealing with the most personal of personal information.
We recently got our CASA Tier-2 compliance done (Cloud Application Security Assessment). We've also gone through Google's OAuth compliance process for every new integration we add that's related to Google. These assessments scan our app and make sure that our software meets pretty stringent standards when it comes to data security and encryption, and that we're not using the data for anything other than the specific features we promise (i.e. not sharing or selling to advertisers, etc.). You can read more about CASA here (https://appdefensealliance.dev/casa). We haven't gone through SOC2 yet, but planning on soon once we have a few more integrations.
This really doesn't say much though. What specific measures are in place to ensure user privacy and data protection?
Does personal information get sent to OpenAI or Claude as part of the functionality? Can users request deletion of their data, and if so, what is the process? Are there specific protocols in place to ensure security? (i.e. Do you use encryption at rest?).
> What specific measures are in place to ensure user privacy and data protection?
Unless you intend to personally audit their code, I'd argue it couldn't possibly matter. Even businesses like Apple publish all kinds of documentation that belies the reality of their infrastructure. The iMessage Security Overview doesn't mention the NSA's retention period for encrypted communique; the push notification documentation doesn't tell you about the government middleman processing each alert.
You either trust people blindly, or you validate them personally. Getting a pinkie-promise about privacy from the CEO is worth absolutely nothing in real-world security terms.
But there is provable, verifiable transparency with what Apple is doing with private cloud compute.
https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
> We want to ensure that security and privacy researchers can inspect Private Cloud Compute software, verify its functionality, and help identify issues — just like they can with Apple devices.
So... in Apple's own words, they are allowed to cherry-pick who's allowed to read their code and audit their privacy, in the same way they strategically deny researchers the ability to audit certain iOS features.
You're still taking them on their word, here.
Microsoft and OpenAI aren’t even providing users with services with any actual confidential compute architecture. You actually need to trust them, but they don’t even claim to do what apple does, so you would need to hallucinate they are making promises they aren’t and believe THAT, and also hope they aren’t hacked or served with a warrant. It’s a different matter with what Apple is doing.
A different matter without distinction. Apple is equally as unaccountable as OpenAI and Microsoft, their only difference is their usual marketing strategy that the industry never took seriously in the first place. If it came out that they were sending the NSA all of your "private" LLM requests (like what happened with push notifications[0]), Apple would just sheepishly admit it and continue advertising their same security-oriented shtick. They're shameless.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...
> Making the log and associated binary software images publicly available for inspection and validation by privacy and security experts.
The measurement logs will be publicly available.
We don't know what those logs will tell us, and if it was designed with privacy in mind it shouldn't say much. Binary software images also don't tell us what the binary is doing, similar to how having all of the iOS files doesn't give you insight into how the OS was programmed. If the server source was fully open source and each machine could attest it was running an unmodified binary, then we might have a level of accountability. As-is, this is no better than Apple's "Trust me, bro" mindset they exercise securing iOS and MacOS.
I feel like messaging around trust is completely missing. Think of hiring a human assistant with this level of access to your life—someone who knows everything about you and can act and speak on your behalf. You'd want strong answers to (1) can they perform this role and (2) can I trust them to know everything about me and speak and act on my behalf. That's a high bar!
As you develop your messaging, I wanted to share the questions I had as I think a lot of users will ask the same:
1. What powers Martin? Is it a custom LLM or powered by OpenAI, Anthropic? 2. Is any of my data ever used in training? 3. Will I always be notified before new texts / calls / actions are taken on my behalf? Does the AI present as me or are my contacts aware that it's an AI assistant that may provide incorrect information? 4. Can I easily and quickly remove all my data and context?
I’m impressed. I’ll probably cancel ChatGPT Pro subscription and switch to this. It actually does what I want.
I’ve been putting it through its paces and it’s handling some complicated requests correctly the first time. For example:
“There is an art festival in my city this weekend. They have a jazz stage my wife and I would like to check out. Find the schedule for each day and create one event every day it’s happening. In the event description put the schedule for each day, and invite my wife.”
It got it right the first time. Pretty amazing.
I see some folks saying it’s just a “wrapper for an LLM” like that’s easy to do. LLMs are not faerie powder that just work for every use case. The personal assistant use case is extremely difficult, which is why the big players haven’t done it yet.
So bravo for the bravado and actually making it work. Privacy is a concern, but honestly I’m not that worried that you can find out which art festival I’ll be at this weekend. But an oncology appointment? I might.
You should create a system where you cannot access user data, and it can never be shared with third parties. Make that system open source to prove it. Give up the potential upside of using this data for revenue so that Martin becomes what it can be. Otherwise, I’ll never feel confident telling Martin anything I don’t want advertisers to know.
Thanks for the comment! Glad to hear Martin stood up to the test!
We can certainly publish more privacy guarantees in the future - thanks for the suggestions. Our business model is subscriptions, so we won't be going anywhere near ads or data sharing.
How do you make yourself future proof from Apple? Apple can just making Siri smarter and add integrations with tons of other softwares, apps, and hardwares?
Age old question with no good answer, as cribbing from the community is how apple brainstorms their new products.
https://ios.gadgethacks.com/how-to/60-ios-features-apple-sto...
Good point.
Apple’s strength and weakness is that there is only one Apple way to do things for ease of use and for it to “just work”. However, not everyone fits into their cookie cutter design regardless of how good it is. Customization and options beyond what Apple does tends to be the way to go.
The idea that the community invented a control panel, notifications, coloured icons, the ability to turn cellular, delete previous calls etc is pretty laughable.
Not saying they invented them. Indeed many of these were initially cribbed from android perhaps. But still, curious indeed how many of them go from popularly installed jailbreak tweak right into a very similar looking and functioning iOS feature a few updates later.
Isn't this the first thing YC would ask? How did this get funded by YC?
I read somewhere that 100% of YC winter 2023 branch had an AI angle which was really sad to read. You have the most well respected and exclusive VC and its investing in mostly companies that are thin wrappers and integrations around an LLM they don't own.
Your mistake was assuming YC cares about "true" value and not (a chance of) monetary success. YC may look all nice and have a decent PR team (and some/many people may genuinely be nice folks) but they're just a business at the end of the day.
> We started building Martin exactly 1 year ago, during our YC batch.
they pivoted mid yc it sounds like. yc chooses founders not ideas.
The TiVo problem https://a16z.com/distribution-vs-innovation/
aka getting Sherlocked
Apple has almost certainly been working on LLM Siri since before this company existed. Not sure that counts as Sherlocking.
Besides the obvious privacy concerns, I'm worried about dangers from it being invoked by someone else within voice range. I've always thought that's why the current Siri has limited abilities.
I'm sure it won't be long before we see apps that listen, record any "Hey Siri" they hear, and then synthesize that voice to give your phone commands to "tell me my passwords", or more insidious and difficult-to-detect commands.
It seems Apple's new version will be facing this problem too.
I already have one or two false positives a day where Siri will mistakenly trigger and search for something random on the internet (I have an iPhone, apple watch and homepods, so I guess it's more likely to happen with more devices listening).
This is something I have been so desperately wanting that I thought I would build a hacky version for myself.
- How did you solve the long-term memory problem? What kind of issues are you facing with scaling the number of tools?
- I like the idea but there's one crucial thing missing for me. I will happily pay for your app if it lets me bring my own API keys/ endpoints for models that I can host, so that I know my data is private and secure.
Thanks for the feedback!
- Right now, we use a combination of RAG and chain of thought for storing memories. At different time intervals, we'll create memories at different levels of granularity. For example, at the end of every conversation, we'll embed some vectors based on specific commands from the user. At the end of each day, we'll have the LLM reflect on key questions related to a user's routine. And every few days, it'll reflect on the user's short/long term goals. This has worked to some degree, but we're still in the very early stages of figuring out how to do long-term memory for an assistant.
- Scaling the number of tools is definitely a struggle since we want to make our integrations as thorough as we can. It takes time, so we just try to keep growing the list consistently. We have an internal goal of adding at least one new major integration every month.
- Love the idea of bringing your own API keys/endpoints. We've gotten this feedback before, so we'll seriously consider it in our next few sprints!
+1 for bringing your own LLM
Noted!
Big fan of Martin personally. One of the few startups I enjoyed and then invested in. Mostly use it for creative brainstorming and talking through ideas. On a morning walk I can cycle through ideas and when I get back to my laptop I have a bunch of research done. Team has been cranking for a while so looking forward to the updates.
This looks really cool and impressive.
As someone who is very interested in using this, may I make two suggestions:
1. Have a list of integrations somewhere on the homepage. It might be there, but if so I missed it. I immediately wanted to know if it can integrate with Obsidian, for example, or Omnifocus. I'm sure others will want to know if "email" means Google only, or Outlook, etc.
2. Make the trial longer. When I see 7 days, what I immediately think is "not enough time to really test this". I'm a busy person, I'm not going to change habits overnight, and unless this thing will immediately integrate into my daily routine (it won't), I'll probably only use it casually the first few times. It would be much better to give me more time to test it. (This is not business advice - maybe I'm wrong and 7 days is better to actually convert users! I'm just giving my immediate reaction.)
I honestly don't understand why tech giants aren't doing this stuff.
Apple has announced basically this on WWDC two months ago (Apple Intelligence), with a multi-tier architecture (on-device, private Apple compute, 3rd party models), a ton of integrations, and a focus on privacy.
My main problem with startups around this is that it’s just a big ask to get access to all my data and store it in their cloud.
> Apple has announced basically this on WWDC two months ago
...after almost 10 years of internal stagnation and killing Siri's other upgrade projects: https://www.macrumors.com/2023/04/27/report-details-turmoil-...
It's just baffling. Same goes for Microsoft and how utterly unusable Cortana is, these features should be more than afterthought integrations that limp along because they're too cheap to get rid of. The slow "evolution" of voice assistants is pretty much ensuring that nobody wants to use them, at least among the people I know that own smartphones. Something tells me that AI won't be the selling point Apple thinks it is, especially when anyone with a web browser can use ChatGPT for free.
Sure, they’re taking their time.
I’ve read through Apple’s Intelligence architecture and I liked what I saw (context graph on device; how the integrations work; if doing remote inference only sending the relevant parts; the architecture of private compute).
I haven’t upgraded my phone in a while, and this will be the final push for me to get their next phone, personally, and I’ve been using ChatGPT and now Claude from the moment they got to a sensible level.
That all of them are taking their sweet time with this makes me think it was just hard to get something production-ready out that will work for 99% of the population well.
> and this will be the final push for me to get their next phone, personally
So let me get this straight. You want AI features, but not the ChatGPT 4o functionality you can go use for free right now. You intend to upgrade to one of the Pro phones (the only ones guaranteed to get local AI functionality) for subpar AI functionality and less freedom to select an LLM that works for you?
I don't get it. Since WWDC I've heard so much contradiction around what people want from Apple AI. Maybe I'm misinformed, but I think it's absolute nonsense that someone would trust OpenAI only when Apple is the middleman. I certainly know the majority of smartphone customers couldn't care less.
> I don't get it
That's very obvious from your comment.
Apple Intelligence is an on-device LLM backed by a private Apple hosted LLM. So it has access to your private data and is designed to provide capabilities that can leverage it e.g. it will have knowledge of all your personal interactions across multiple apps. It is fundamentally a personal experience.
It is completely different from ChatGPT which is a single LLM that is used to provide a public experience. And nothing is stopping you from using Claude, Mistral or any other LLMs through their existing apps.
> And nothing is stopping you from using Claude, Mistral or any other LLMs through their existing apps.
That's what I'm talking about, really. Why would you buy a new iPhone to get functionality you can receive from the App Store?
I can see two reasons. You're either one of the evergreen sycophants that buys into Apple's security theater, or you're an obsessive Apple-maniac that will use any of their products no matter how bad they are. Those are two miniscule audiences, in the market of current and future iPhone owners. You would have to show me market research to convince me that even 5% of iPhone owners fall into either category.
So I'll ask again: does anyone really think an inferior local AI with access to your contacts list is going to drive upgrades? Mind you, in the EU Apple isn't even shipping these features because they have to mysteriously and arbitrarily prevent developers from offering competing AI integrations.
You really aren't getting it.
Apple's LLM is not a competitor for ChatGPT, Claude, Mistral etc.
It is an on-device model that has access to all of your private data e.g. health, contacts, mail, photos, messages etc. Something that no other LLM will ever get access to. Which means you can ask highly contextualised questions like "show me the photos I took on my last holiday". Again something no other LLM can do.
And it may not drive upgrades on its own but people asked for a better Siri and Apple unquestionably delivered on it.
> Something that no other LLM will ever get access to.
Why? There's no technical reason it's impossible. LLMs don't need an internet connection or persistent local storage; Apple could safely run any LLM with personal data in a sandbox denied internet access. Running Llama or Phi on my data is no less secure than Apple's own local models.
Even if Apple does thwart antitrust efforts and becomes the new exclusive offline model provider for iPhone... how does that drive sales? People predisposed to avoid Siri aren't going to be enticed by an AI-powered upgrade, unless they wanted Siri to be wrong more often. These people have access to better LLMs for free, on any device they choose. The only thing Apple can leverage against them is handling the data they store on the device they own... something Apple is very obviously afraid to attempt in markets where they're already scrutinized.
Again, besides the perennial Apple investors I do not know a single iPhone owner that cares about anything you just said.
I think you missed the part that ChatGPT is completely optional in Apple’s architecture. You have to explicitly allow ChatGPT per-prompt if you want to use it. The primary models are on-device and their “private compute“.
Importantly, I have a fair bit of trust towards OpenAI, but I’m not willing to share the details of half my digital life with them.
After reading Apple’s Intelligence architecture, I feel fairly comfortable with having it use the data from all my various apps for context.
> After reading Apple’s Intelligence architecture, I feel fairly comfortable with having it use the data from all my various apps for context.
I would take those whitepapers with a grain of salt if I were you. Apple's documentation has been known for redacting certain... details, per the request of the US government. Plus, it's not like you or I can go audit the tech (or even the code) and confirm it's the same as in the documentation.
Then again, I trust OpenAI and Apple both as far as I can throw them. Maybe it is me being overly discriminate about what I consider secure and not.
Please. Don't mention apple and AI in the same sentance. Siri is worse than zero, it is utterly absolutely useless. And to partner with OpenAI. They have to get their S** in order here and fast, but if I put out a product like Siri I would be INSANELY embarrassed. If I was a trillion-dollar company and did, I would resign in discrace.
> Same goes for Microsoft and how utterly unusable Cortana is...
“Alexa, how much are you costing Amazon per user and how much do they want to charge me to revamp it?”
“Thank you for asking. Here is a top rated result”: https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2023/06/hey-alexa...
Sorry, she meant to show you this: https://www.reuters.com/technology/amazon-mulls-5-10-monthly...
It will be a consummate miracle if spending more on AI-based NLP somehow becomes more profitable than the cheaper alternatives.
They move slow. Smaller folks can move fast. "Sherlocked" potential is high, but on the bright side, could move the needle on open source capabilities in this space (if they can do, someone else can do). A rising tide lifts all boats. And it is great PR regardless for the folks building from a portfolio perspective if they have to pivot or move on to other endeavors.
Because if TECH GIANT gets this sort of thing wrong (CCPA,GDPR,ePR, anti-trust, <add acronym here>) there is <fine_bigger_than_your_series_C> waiting for them.
Same! We've all been waiting for an upgrade from Apple/Google for the last 10 years.
Apple plans to update Siri to use OpenAI models in iOS 18.
Not sure how it will affect this startup.
They’re planning to update it to use on-device models, their “private compute” models, and optionally for certain prompts (with explicit user approval) OpenAI models.
This is not directly in contradiction to what you said, but I feel like there’s a lot of confusion around this.
I'm equally surprised.
It has been a few years and my Android assistant is still dumb. I would have expected the iOS/Android assistants to be much better by now.
Apple wants their shit to be tight. They cannot release stuff that hallucinates.
I am guessing its against their philosophy to release product that only works sometimes from the get go. Thats why they have been so demure about whole AI stuff.
I do think in general, Apple is great at continuous improvement.
But have you used Siri?
“Only works sometimes”, yes if all you ever ask is “what time is it”, what’s the weather, and maybe 5-6 other canned prompts.
Half the time it doesn’t even understand or catch what’s being said. (Mainly talking about the HomePod, it generally works fine on an iPhone)
Siri is a great example of Apple being perfectly fine letting a product languish so what might’ve been great 10 years ago is a punchline now.
You missed it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41116563
On your homepage you have the call to action that goes to a Stripe page, but no real indication that it's an iOS-only application. If I was an excited Android user and went through the payment process only to find out it doesn't have an Android app I'd be very annoyed.
Anyway, a few thoughts...
1. I find the event planning stuff to be kind of stale. Like maybe it will be cool this time, but so far it's part of every demo and concept around AI assistants and it's never ACTUALLY been cool. I wish this was trying to be cool in a new way.
2. The turn-taking for voice input looks kind of awkward. I get why it has to be that way, and there's not really a better solution, but... well, maybe it would be possible to use visual output and voice input, or generally make them complement each other. Many details are better to show visually and can be tedious to listen to.
3. I like the patient and attentive secretary model more than the turn-taking chat. The confirmation turn-taking is a trust exercise (did the AI _really_ hear and understand what I said?) but I think there's other ways to handle that trust. Like being more trustworthy (modern non-streaming speech recognition works really well!), making things easy to undo, or detecting unlikely commands and require verification.
4. For example, when reviewing a to-do list, I'd rather it show the list and I can just say "yeah, I finished item 1 and 2, and I was able to pick up milk but there's still some other groceries I need to get for tonight" and have it complete and revise entries based on that.
5. Generally to-do and task management is 10x more interesting to me than calendaring. But you should have a theory, not just be a layer over something else. I should be able to break down tasks, complete subtasks, identify partial completion and have it identify the remaining portions, get suggestions on breakdown, get advice on which tasks to complete when, etc.
6. Another interesting thing would be a kind of personal database. I would love to be able to unload a lot of information from my head and know that it will be put someplace where it can be meaningfully retrieved, combined with other data, etc. Like if I have certain bill payments or house maintenance I want to remember or something, I don't want to turn that into calendar items. Lots of them aren't even fully articulated, or the structure will emerge as more information becomes available. But I want to get started before I have carefully defined the task, and an AI assistant could do that.
I like the idea of a more intricate theory for task management. We also don't want to just wrap your calendar. Right now, you can dump a bunch of upcoming tasks to Martin through voice, text, or via a forwarded email. It'll set them as reminders and then bring them up in future syncs to check on progress. It's just a start though, we can definitely make it more complete - i.e. "break down tasks, complete subtasks, identify partial completion and have it identify the remaining portions, get suggestions on breakdown, get advice on which tasks to complete when."
We'll be experimenting a lot and releasing updates to Martin's home screen layout and feed soon! There's a good chance this will come with changes in how we do task management altogether.
Also totally hear you on the personal database idea. We've been toying with similar ideas for a while. Many users already do this with Martin, basically brain dump in a long voice session, and it'll suggest reminders/calendar events for you. We're still figuring out how to display this personal DB info to the user in a UI though, so would love to hear your suggestions.
Дорогой Мартин Алексеевич![1]
1. https://languagehat.com/sorokins-norma/
Hate that you need a credit card to try it. Installed anyway, Martin just crashes. Does not load at all. Fail. iPhone 11, iOS 17.5.1. Location in Australia.
So sorry to hear! If you’re up for giving it another shot, please email me at dawson@trymartin.com. Will get it fixed for you.
Sick demo - looks useful. I'd totally be down to try it out, but as a consumer product I don't really want to put my credit card down.
Very cool! Congrats on the launch. Is Martin able to respond to someone if they text back? Also what are some of the most commonly used integrations?
Yes! If you have your Martin send a text to a contact, he'll respond to the contact automatically when they text back. You can track these replies in the app. Our most commonly used integrations are probably reminders and calendar - a lot of users like to sync with Martin in the morning and tell it everything on their schedule today, so they can be reminded throughout the day!
I don't know how these get funded by YC. I have followed YC from the beginning and it seems it funds so many of these startups on the "current thing" these days.
Maybe the founders they are funding are not diverse enough. Is there too much tracking on which universities they went to? So the same set is applying and getting funded?
I personally prefer a UI most of the time. It's higher fidelity and cuts through the inherent ambiguity of language.
The exception for me would be situations where I can't use my hands, like driving. I don't want to have to look at a screen. If a voice agent could replicate the functionality of CarPlay, that would be really useful.
We’re working on getting Martin to work better in the car! You’ll be able to either call him over the phone or use him via CarPlay in the next couple months.
Looks great guys! I'm working specifically on improving voice interfaces too. Maybe I can join you guys to help you out!
Also I feel you, about running into all of the challenges your facing with LLMs. We've run into quiet a few road blocks, but your comments summarises it the best. Just keep working on it step by step.
Thanks! What have been the main LLM/voice challenges you've faced? We're always down to trade notes if helpful! Feel free to email me anytime at dawson@trymartin.com.
I just gave Martin a go. What I'm looking for is an AI PA that can:
- do some research on a given company/individual/website and give me a summary.
- preferably also identify a contact email.
- handle selecting a good time for meetings according to my availability and preferences.
- handle the communication with the other party.
- let me know when it is arranged, or if it's given up.
I signed up and gave it a UK phone number, and got a UK number back for texting Martin. I'm not sure why it has to be SMS when it could be an in-app chat. I was expecting to get a confirmation SMS or similar, but it just accepted it straight away. When I texted the number I was given (several times), it was delivered but there was no reply.
Martin sent me an email welcoming me. I replied asking it to set up a meeting for early next week with another email address. Martin replied saying it is unable to email people on my behalf, and suggested I set it up myself.
> Unfortunately, I am currently unable to send emails to other people on your behalf. However, you can easily send an email to ** to schedule the meeting for early next week in the afternoon.
I reminded Martin that there is an example on the website homepage of doing just that, and it replied saying it can indeed schedule meetings, and asked for the details again. I replied with the same details, and it confirmed the meeting was set up.
I checked my other email, and there was no message setting anything up. I told Martin that the other party needs to know about the email, and it replied with:
> Understood. I'll make sure to inform ** about the meeting details.
Still nothing received. Furthermore, I checked the app and I haven't even connected my calendar, so I'm surprised it didn't warn me or prompt me to do this when I asked for a meeting.
I gave up with that and decided to try something else. I forwarded Martin an email thread from a lead, which included a lot of back story on their organization, offering, and some areas that they think we could potentially collaborate on. I asked Martin to find out more about the company, and evaluate the options for collaboration.
This lead is in the AI space, with their primary product being a document digitisation solution to help surface and discover business documents.
Martin replied describing it as a "nearbound revenue platform to streamline revenue operations", with a key feature being "Automated lead scoring and distribution to prioritize high potential leads". As far as evaluating the collaboration opportunities, it instead gave me a list of collaboration features within the platform, none of which exist.
At the end, it linked to a blog post to their recent funding round. Except, the blog post was from a completely unrelated company with a similar name. Bear in mind that the originally forwarded email was from their business email account, and the body contained multiple links and references to their website.
I decided to try one more test, and asked it to do some research on my own business website and let me know what it finds out. It's been 20 minutes, and I haven't had a reply. I checked the app to see if there was any indication it's working on something for me, but nothing their either.
I love the idea of Martin, but I'll be canceling my trial - it just doesn't seem anywhere near ready yet - especially given I have to trust it to communicate on my behalf.
Thank you for all the feedback! Just wanted to hop on and address a few things.
- I totally resonate with your criteria for an AI PA - this is very much what we're working towards with our email integration. We had been focused on voice for a while, but recently started tackling all the email use cases. Really want to get these right for you!
- Sorry for the poor onboarding job - we should make it more clear that you have to sync your calendar before we send you an email inviting you to send and forward scheduling items to Martin.
- For sending emails to contacts, this is one of our upcoming integrations that we've been building for a while - but just not ready yet! We want to make it able to send/reply to emails and fully act on threads that you attach it to. This means issuing you a unique email address for "your Martin" and managing it's behavior on threads and memory of other contacts. It's a harder problem than we first anticipated, so we're working through it steadily! It should be ready in the next month or so. For now, the communications feature is just limited to texting contacts on your behalf.
- For "deep searches", it definitely isn't the greatest at digging into a topic or generating a thorough briefing for you right now. We're not sure how deep we'll go into this use case in the future, but we do plan on integrating with more specialized functions, like LinkedIn, Twitter, Maps, etc. which should make this a lot better.
Sorry again for the poor onboarding experience. I think we also got an email from you, so will reply there as well to ask for more feedback!
“It definitely isnt the greatest at digging into a topic”
I think this is the greatest drawback to using a tool like this. It does good with the low hanging fruit tasks like responding to a txt. But it does poorly at a loooong range of long tail tasks like conpany research, or summarizing a topic or gathering the latest headlines for a topic, or finding leads or alerting me when someone mentions my brand on Twitter or when someone links to my blog post.
And when soneone tries to do any of those things and gets a bad user experience, theyll give up on your tool
That is what valuable customer feedback looks like. I won't be surprised if Apple uses your feedback for their upcoming Siri. Unfortunately based on this and other feedback here it looks like Martin had a very late launch. Hope this turns into a proper product because we do need a Siri competitor.
for what you're after, my app howie.ai would work well. we don't do nearly as much as Martin does, instead we're narrowly focused on getting the scheduling use case right. i'm a@howie.ai if you want to try it out!
would love this, especially being in the EU where Apple Intelligence fearures might not be released or would need one of the latest devices, but 30$ a month is a big no no for me, i'd rather do my own implementation for a fraction of the price!
If you're capable of doing your own implementation, the cost of the hours of your own labour that you'd spend on it is likely much more than $30/month.
Will definitely try. Been tinkering with similar.
Want big $$$? Support exchange 365 via MS Graph API or whatever today's preferred api is.
Great to hear you've been tinkering with similar ideas! Would love to try out what you've built too.
Exchange is on our list! Started the Microsoft compliance process a couple months ago - expecting to get support for at least outlook or word rolled out this year.
What are the existing similar products?
Can actually use it to dictate something for me and customize it and then save it save it like how aqua voice does?
You can dictate to Martin and have him transcribe for you and send you the notes over email or text, but we don't support directly editing documents yet - though this is coming soon (we're planning to integrate Martin with your Google/Word docs this fall)!
Big fan of what you guys are building! This looks like an amazing product that can help save a ton of time :)
Thanks for the comment!
From what I've read it seems Siri was intentionally kept where it is
What are you spending per user on API costs? 7 days free trial seems quite generous.
One subscription is worth 2-3 million tokens at retail cost. I doubt the average user even consumes a quarter of that a month even with the RAG overheard.
Congrats on the launch.
Please update the video to bleep out “Siri”
> * Something else Martin does which is unlike other voice assistants is it can have full text conversations with your contacts on your behalf from its own phone number. For example, you can tell it to plan a lunch with a friend, and it can text back and forth with that friend to figure out a time and place.*
If the contact thought they were talking to me, it would be fucking dystopian. I would immediately break contact with someone who gaslighted me with AI.
Please make some sort of pledge or guarantee that your company will never impersonate a human and that it will always identify itself as a machine when communicating with others.
I totally agree! It would be extremely awkward. Just so that there's never any confusion with the contact, we make sure Martin always starts his texts with "[name of owner]'s Martin here."
I wonder how long before your AI starts talking to their AI, only for their AI to get frustrated and demand to speak to a real person instead.
$30 a month seems steep for an early stage product. I could get a few million tokens for that price :/
Sounds, will give it a try!
So is my data from all these apps being sent elsewhere? I don't want another spy tentacle.
On your YC page it lists three founders: Dawson, Harsh and Arjun. But Dawson is the only one listed pretty much everywhere else online. Does this mean the other two founders have quit, and if so I worry about sinking $30 into something which may not exist very soon.
what model are you using?
We're using GPT and Claude for different parts of the software!
This looks really well done and I appreciate the real, live demo instead of some over produced bullshit.
Nice job!
Thanks!
Not trying to be rude, but… how is this a business? Apple is uniquely poised to deliver a solution here. I don’t see how a business could compete with that.
They even announced it during the WWDC this year.
Again, I’m a founder myself. Not trying to poopoo on this. I’m just curious how this idea has legs with all the might of Apple looking poised to crush this.
The YC folks must like you as founders because your business is 100% going to get eaten and you're going to be lucky to get aqui-hired. Get ready to pivot.
Exactly. Apple is using LLMs to make a better Siri. This is already in the next iOS update.
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This looks awesome, so excited to try out the product!! Such a unique spin on the voice AI agents out there.
unique? hardly. honestly the greentext name raises the likelihood significantly that this is mere astroturfing. i know we should allow benefit of the doubt but it seems hard to believe anyone involved enough in this discussion to post comments is naive enough not to know the possibilities within the LLM space today.
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