8 ms·

Reimagining the mouse pointer for the AI era

252 points by devhouse 5mo ago

strgrd 5mo ago
No thanks
delusional 5mo ago
Its like watching a demo from the old Xerox PARC, except everybody has only bad ideas. Like an opposite Xerox PARC.
- walrus01 5mo ago
  It's like a demo from Xerox PARC in an alternate universe where everything is run by marketing department MBAs. Oh wait, that's the one we live in now.
AbuAssar 5mo ago
so Google will be monitoring whatever on the screen continuously or only when the user say the magic words (this, that, here, there)?
- EdgeExplorer 5mo ago
  Indeed. "AI-enabled pointer" is misdirection. This isn't an AI-enabled pointer; it's sending screen to AI, which yes, includes pointer position. The AI doesn't live in the pointer. The AI lives, apparently, so thoroughly in the system that it can see and do anything, and the pointer is just a way of giving it context.
- OtomotO 5mo ago
  Google Recall. Hey, it's all about the marketing.
loaderchips 5mo ago
It's beautiful how the human mind can take something very obvious but overlooked and make it into this fantastic innovation. Fab stuff.
SirFatty 5mo ago
It only took Google and their AI offering to come up with Graffiti.
themafia 5mo ago
> We’ve been exploring new AI-powered capabilities to help the pointer not only understand what it’s pointing at, but also why it matters to the user. We couldn't quite track you well enough before. So we're fixing that under the guise of "AI powered capabilities."
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
iridione 5mo ago
Interesting! I wonder how UI will evolve in the long-term? If there are browser-use/computer-use and clicky-clones automating pointer actions, do we really need complex UI anymore? If yes, when?
- Ancapistani 5mo ago
  I've been playing with writing a visionOS app that allows an AI agent to be aware of what you're looking at at any given time. At some point I fully expect eye tracking (or attention tracking) to be common enough to be a first-class input method.
mvdtnz 5mo ago
Both of the text based demos would have been simpler and faster with traditional mouse and keyboard interactions. What is the AI adding?
- slopinthebag 5mo ago
  It feels like everything modern is like this. No value added, just the appearance of it.
- hyperhello 5mo ago
  They’re going to take your abilities to do anything and spread it across many places so you have to run around to do them, same as all the moneyed technology.
- dfxm12 5mo ago
  It tracks what's on the screen and sends it back to Alphabet. If you're watching a video about BBQ, enjoy a bunch of ads for Omaha steaks and big green egg in your Gmail. On a less serious note, the audience for this is people who want to optimize for what seems like the least amount of effort.
- wartywhoa23 5mo ago
  Hype-flavored surveillance!
- dieselgate 5mo ago
  Yeah it's a gimmick
- mrhottakes 5mo ago
  > What is the AI adding? More $$$ for the PM who launched the product.
- layer8 5mo ago
  The AI is adding that you don’t need to provide a button or menu item or keyboard shortcut for each possible action, or for the user having to know that the command is there and how to access it. I prefer keyboard operation myself, but I can see how this could become useful in the future, for certain use cases. What would be useful as well then is if you could bind such a repeatedly-used AI command to button/menu item/keyboard shortcut in a way that it can still be used with pointing “this” and “that”.
mcookly 5mo ago
I wonder what sort of monstrous power would be unleashed if Google used Plan9 as a foundation.
- bitwize 5mo ago
  They'd half-finish it then bury it, like they did with Fuchsia which is heavily Plan-9-inspired.
  - DonHopkins 5mo ago
    Google Plan 4.5
tintor 5mo ago
Of course, it isn't a Google Demo, if you can't use it to book a table at restaurant. (shown at the bottom of the page)
- rhet0rica 5mo ago
  My thoughts exactly. Why the fuck is this the primary concern of EVERY person who works at Google?!
  - bitwize 5mo ago
    Aside from work—commerce, entertainment, and social communication are pretty much the only things most normies will ever use a computer for. Maybe light accounting and scheduling as well. This has been true since the 90s when the normie market for computers opened way up due to the internet becoming widely available, and companies have been demoing commercial applications for their equipment and software since then if not even before. Ordering food for delivery was the big one back then. Here's Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry ordering Chinese via fax with the new Windows 95 in 1995: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLlWrt-zmTo&t=685s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLlWrt-zmTo&t=685s I'm sure Don Hopkins can tell you a long annotated tale about the NeWS pizza ordering app that displayed a real-time dynamically-updated rotating pie on the screen as you filled out your order.
  - cmrdporcupine 5mo ago
    What else can you do in the Bay Area sprawl other than work and go to restaurants? Is there anything else?
LocalH 5mo ago
do not want
jaccola 5mo ago
This seems like one of those things that is usable infrequently enough to be forgotten/poorly developed/never used. (Even before accounting for the actual failure rate of the LLM which will be none-zero). Perhaps a text box and file upload isn’t the perfect interface for every use case but it is versatile which is a huge barrier to overcome.
jinkuan 5mo ago
being able to make precise edits would be huge for AI
OtomotO 5mo ago
Like a dream come true... Nightmares are dreams as well and this is a nightmare like Windows Recall. Technically wonderful though.
nolist_policy 5mo ago
Wiggle at CAPTCHAs, wiggle at Termux, wiggle at Emacs, wiggle at the Godot Editor, wiggle at my remote desktop. (Not going to happen)
jpatten 5mo ago
Reminds me of Put That There https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RyBEUyEtxQo https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RyBEUyEtxQo
- raphman 5mo ago
  Ah, yes - I was trying to remember the name. Also featured in the Starfire vision video from 1992: https://youtu.be/jhe1DFY-SsQ?t=286 https://youtu.be/jhe1DFY-SsQ?t=286
  - jpatten 5mo ago
    haha that's right I'd forgotten about that one!
- benwen 5mo ago
  Beat me to it! Back in 1980. Here’s the official link https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/put-that-there-voice-and-gesture-at-the-graphics-interface/ https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/put-that-there-voice-... And the paper https://dam-prod.media.mit.edu/uuid/8e6d934b-6c6f-48e4-b0a1-270e0dae745f https://dam-prod.media.mit.edu/uuid/8e6d934b-6c6f-48e4-b0a1-...
- DonHopkins 5mo ago
  Ah yes, the spiritual progenitor of MacPlaymate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacPlaymate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacPlaymate >The game features a panic button that when clicked on will cover the computer screen with a fake spreadsheet. The player can also choose to print out Maxie's current pose as a pinup. https://archive.org/details/mac_MacPlaymate https://archive.org/details/mac_MacPlaymate Geraldo interviews Chuck Farnham about getting sued by Playboy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42571845 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42571845 https://www.upi.com/Archives/1989/02/09/Playboy-sues-over-sexy-computer-game/6887603003600/ https://www.upi.com/Archives/1989/02/09/Playboy-sues-over-se...
kjellsbells 5mo ago
I sense a privacy problem brewing. It reminds me of Microsoft Recall in the sense that some portion of the screen is going to be continuously transmitted outside of the users control. What happens when someone browses something very private (planning a surprise engagement. looking at medical data. planning a protest)? All that data gets slurped to google and subject to a warrant or discovery or building your advertising fingerprint. Maybe the idea is that the data is sent to AI only when you right click, but that seems like a very thin firewall that a product manager will breach in the interests of delivering "predictive AI" via some kind of precomputed results.
- mrhottakes 5mo ago
  > What happens when someone browses something very private? Profit!
- accurrent 5mo ago
  At some point I hope that we will reach a point where these megacorps figure that running these things locally might be most cost effective. FWIW I think local models I run on my MacBook are good enough for most of the tasks that this kind of interaction may ask for.
- xigoi 5mo ago
  That’s the whole point. Users who want this “feature” will give Google permission to permanently record their screen.
simondw 5mo ago
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but what is new about the pointer itself? Seems to be functionally the same as selecting + tooltips / context menus.
- kwertyoowiyop 5mo ago
  Shush, how is anyone going to get promoted with that kind of talk!?
- DaiPlusPlus 5mo ago
  > but what is new about the pointer itself? I'm hoping for a const-reference joke.
SirMaster 5mo ago
Thanks, I hate it
why_at 5mo ago
My first impression coming away from this is skepticism. Anything with voice controls for routine use is a pretty tough sell. Doing this when you're not completely alone would be annoying to everyone around you. Most of their examples seem like they could have been done with a right click drop down menu so they don't really need to "re-invent the mouse pointer". So is this thing talking to Google's servers all the time for the AI integration? So it won't work if you're not connected to the internet? Privacy concerns are obvious; now Google wants to have an AI watching literally everything you do on your computer? Does it cost the user anything for the LLM use? If it's free will it stay free forever? That's quite a lot to give away if they're expecting people to use it to change a single word like in one of their examples. I guess they're expecting to make the money back by gathering data about literally everything you do on your computer. There might be a killer app for AI integration with personal computers that has yet to be invented, but this doesn't look like it.
- nolist_policy 5mo ago
  The "Edit an Image" Demo at the bottom is pretty fun. Maybe this is just Google flexing their LLM inference capacity.
  - maccard 5mo ago
    That demo was an absolute disaster for me on Firefox on mac. It just fundamentally didn't work - the voice wasway behind my pointer, there were multiple agents speaking over each other saying conflicting things, and it couldn't even move the crab to the bottom right of the image. Embarassingly bad I would say!
- AirMax98 5mo ago
  Right — it does seem cool but the voice is patching over a major gap. If I'm talking already, why wouldn't I just describe what I'm looking at and have the AI grab it for me?
  - xg15 5mo ago
    I think they answer that question pretty convincingly: Because if what you're looking at is already on the screen, it much more easy to point to it and say "that" than to describe it. (And if it's an abstract entity like a file, it might not even be possible to describe it, short of rattling off the entire file path)
brgsk 5mo ago
what the hell is going on at google
- ori_b 5mo ago
  AI.
Joker_vD 5mo ago
Just seven hours ago there was a plea on HN [0] to please not do this. Seriously, what are they smoking at Google right now? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48107027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48107027
pmarreck 5mo ago
There's already a product that does this lol Aaaaand now I can't remember the name of it
hmokiguess 5mo ago
Don't build these things, instead build protocols and expose system level APIs for application developers to build things.
arjie 5mo ago
Oh interesting, this is very cool. At first I thought it was just focus-follows-mouse but it's more interesting. You have certain keywords trigger "add to prompt". Ignoring the voice functionality (which is admittedly crucial currently because other inputs currently take over focus), I've often wanted to just have a continuous conversation with the LLM as I 'point and click' (or tab over and select) at various things. Might be neat to have text input focus continue to go to the LLM where I'm typing text etc. Sometimes I go to a different page to take a screenshot and other times I'm browsing for a file, and other times I'm highlighting some log lines. Cursor did this well, with selecting text in the terminal auto-focusing the Cursor agent textbox so you could talk to the agent and then select some text and you didn't have to re-select the original agent textbox again. The agent is a top-level function in that system not "just another app I have to switch to" to take my context with. I have some small amount of bias because I've always felt input-constrained on computers. I have to move my hands to go places and that's exasperating. I've tried head tracking, had a vim pedal for a while, and used tiling WMs, and things like this to aid but while my vim-fu is pretty good and I function inside things very well with it, my cross-application interface isn't. In the end, perhaps we all have our home offices with our Apple Vision Pros and we talk to them like this to maneouvre faster through our machines and get our ideas into them. Cool research. I wonder what we'll end up with.
- skydhash 5mo ago
  > I have some small amount of bias because I've always felt input-constrained on computers. I have to move my hands to go places and that's exasperating. I've tried head tracking, had a vim pedal for a while, and used tiling WMs, and things like this to aid but while my vim-fu is pretty good and I function inside things very well with it, my cross-application interface isn't Why not constrain your computing? It will require some programming chops, but you can note down your common tasks, figure out where actual input are required, and automate the rest.
  - arjie 5mo ago
    I can only conclude that I don't have the programming + product chops to figure out what is truly the common element that can be automated.
juancn 5mo ago
Please don't. I like text selection exactly how it is. I want precise controls. It's fine for a touch interface like a phone, but on a computer I expect precision. As much as I can get.
xiphias2 5mo ago
Google needs to beat OpenAI and Antropic in coding models because that's where the big money is going. I love using the Gemini pro model for quick questions, but that's not where I'm spending the real money. They have so many great software engineers but unable to use them to speed up coding AI research. Hopefully with Sergey's focus it will get better. This cursor thing is just another experiment nobody cares about.
maheenaslam 5mo ago
The concept is good but accuracy in cluttered environment can be a concern, also misinterpreting context can be a problem
chromacity 5mo ago
My reaction to the first demo (recipe) is that it was slower than typing the same thing on your keyboard. The second demo seems to be a wash: there's no time saved in saying "move this" versus "move crab". And an app-specific contextual menu would probably be faster. The third demo doesn't seem to warrant the use of a pointer at all, since there is only one way to interpret the prompt. None of this means that this approach will not be successful, but there's a reason why so many attempts to revolutionize user interfaces ended up going nowhere. Talking to your computer was always supposed to be the future, but in practice, it's slower and more finicky than typing. In fact, the only new UI paradigm of the past 28+ years appears to have been touchscreens and swipe gestures on phones. But they are a matter of necessity. No one wants to finger-paint on a desktop screen.
- joe5150 5mo ago
  Talking to your computer can only ever work for people in atomized work-from-home silos, surely. I can't really imagine living in a world where everybody is just muttering commands to the computer all the time.
  - bonsai_spool 5mo ago
    This happens daily in radiology departments around the world
    - zbentley 5mo ago
      Aren’t radiologists dictating notes rather than issuing commands to the computer? From supporting them for a few years, I recall them having pretty good facility using the computer to zoom/filter/isolate parts of images, and most of the muttering was speech to text or a good old tape recorder for their writeups.
      - bonsai_spool 5mo ago
        The dictation happens while reviewing images and the dictation software includes support for voice macros ranging from edits to adding information from the chart and other applications. Not quite the same as just recording.
dandaka 5mo ago
Next generation of OS should have constant video and audio recognition by on device LLM. This will provide valuable context for a lot of scenarios. So instead of frequent copy-pasting we are used to, we can let agents access context of our whole workflows from different apps. But Google is a very ill positioned candidate for such OS. I would rather trust Apple and local-first on-device models.
- mrhottakes 5mo ago
  Next generation OS should absolutely -not- have always-on surveillance like you describe.
  - Legend2440 5mo ago
    It's not surveillance if it's on-device.
    - DonHopkins 5mo ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance >Sousveillance (/suːˈveɪləns/ soo-VAY-lənss) is the recording of an activity by a member of the public, rather than a person or organisation in authority, typically by way of small wearable or portable personal technologies.[14] The term, coined by Steve Mann,[15] stems from the contrasting French words sur, meaning "above", and sous, meaning "below", i.e. "surveillance" denotes the "eye in the sky" watching from above, whereas "sousveillance" denotes bringing the means of observation down to human level, either physically (by mounting cameras on people rather than on buildings) or hierarchically (with ordinary people observing, rather than by higher authorities or by architectural means).[16][17][23]
      - dandaka 5mo ago
        The goal is not to record activities of others, it is to have full context of operator activity. More like a personal knowledge base, that camera pointing to a cop.
  - 5mo ago
gobdovan 5mo ago
This is how I always imagined FE development would work once ChatGPT 3 came out. Then Cursor appeared and seeing how successful they were with just a chat and a few tool calls, I thought I was over-complicating things. Anyway, I built a prototype on this idea, but instead of relying only on hover, I press Option to select a node in a custom AST-ish semantic layer I designed around a minimalist UI grammar, and Option + up/down arrows to move to parent/child node. This way, I have have an accurate pointer to the element I want to talk about, plus a minimal context window (parent component, state, a few navigation related queries). What I learned from using it, though, is that the killer use case isn't necessarily the flashy "talk to this UI element" interaction shown in the Google demos. I do use it that way too; I have `Option + Shift + click` to copy a selector to the clipboard, so I can give an LLM connected to the live medium a precise reference to the element I want to discuss. But the place where it has been most useful day to day is much simpler: source navigation. Point at the thing in the UI, jump to the code that is responsible for it. The difficult part is jumping to the code you care about (the code for UI or for the semantic element?), but in my system that distinction turned out to be usually obvious, which is what makes the interaction useful.
ianbicking 5mo ago
I've been doing something similar to this in a personal claude code frontend, though not particularly "magical". I'm mostly using my system to make comments on long AI-generated documents (especially design documents). I find it works well to have the AI generate something, and then I read through it, making comments along the way. You can get pretty far just repeating the things you see... "I'm reading [heading] and [comments]". But I do find some use in selecting content and saying "I don't agree with this" or whatever else. The result is just an augmented message. It looks like: <transcript> Let's see what we've got here. <selection doc="proposal.md" location="paragraph 3"> The system already... </selection> No, I don't like how this is approaching the problem, ... </transcript> Then I just send this as a user message. Claude Code (and I'm guessing any of the agentic systems) picks up on the markup very easily. It also helps to label it as a transcript, as it can understand there may be errors, and things like spelling and punctuation are inferred not deliberate. (Some additional instruction is necessary to help it understand, for example, that it should look for homophones that might make more sense in context.) It makes reviewing feel pretty relaxed and natural. I've played around with similar note taking systems, which I think could be great for studying in school, but haven't had the focus on that particular problem to take it very far. But I think the best thing really is giving the agent a richer understanding of what the user is experiencing and doing and just creating a rich representation of that. The keywords can be useful, but almost only as checkpoints: a keyword can identify the moment to take the transcript and package it up and deliver it. One difference perhaps in design motivation: I have really embraced long latency interactions. I use ChatGPT with extended thinking by default, and just suck it up when the answer didn't really require thinking. I deliver 10 points of feedback at once instead of little by little. (Often halfway through I explicitly contradict myself, because I'm thinking out loud and my ideas are developing.) I just don't stress out about latency or feedback, and so low-latency but lower-intelligence interactions don't do it for me (such as ChatGPT's advanced voice mode, or probably Thinking Machine's work). I think this focus is in part a value statement: I'm trying to do higher quality work, not faster work.
- 8note 5mo ago
  this is pretty built in with vscode plugins. you select text in vscode, and write a comment, and the llm gets both
1970-01-01 5mo ago
How about you give me my normal white cursor and an "AI enhanced" orange cursor only when I'm doing AI things. To use their words, that would be "intuitive AI that meets users across all the tools they use, without interrupting their flow"
botanrice 5mo ago
while these examples might be easy fodder for criticism I do feel like this whole idea of talking to an LLM across multiple applications and anything your pointer is on will give it context is pretty powerful and cool idea. I'm imagining a webpage with a link - instead of opening a new link to quickly google something or opening three new tabs based on hyperlinks, i can point at a paragraph or line and ask it to tell me about it. Maybe I can point at a song on Spotify and have it find me the youtube video, or vice versa (of course this is assuming a tool like this wouldn't stay locked into one ecosystem.. which it will). Point is that the concept of talking to the computer with mouse as pointer is pretty cool and i guess a step closer to that whole sci-fi "look at this part of the screen and do something"
- holoduke 5mo ago
  Yeah. We just need 10x more compute. But constant ai analysing of everything is the ultimate direction.
  - botanrice 5mo ago
    I wonder what the smallest, still practical, application of this would be now if you could implement it locally on your machine assuming you have decent hardware. Maybe something with the file system? Like hover over any file and instead of seeing a snapshot or some details/metadata you could get a quick 1-2 line sentence on what it is. I suppose you may want to have that saved somewhere as well to cache it... but I'm def not an expert. This would solve the always difficult issue of finding that one document! I still have trouble with document search on both mac & windows OS sometimes.
- Nathanba 5mo ago
  I agree that AI audio interfaces will be the future but not because they are better UIs for users as we understand the term "user" today. The future users of UI are not users of UI at all, they want nothing to do with learning UI or what buttons to press or where to type something. They want to go to the shopping site and instead of typing anything into a search field they want to say "Find me some boots for the summer, I wanna look fresh" and then tell it to complete the purchase via voice as well once it found something. At most they'll still click some filters in the results page and on individual results but that will be it.
homeonthemtn 5mo ago
This is pretty neat
justvugg 5mo ago
really interesting! This change now fits a faster UX and use.
robot-wrangler 5mo ago
A zigzag merge gesture is obviously a terrible idea until/unless everything is a touch screen. Did they even think about this stuff at all? Ergonomics and RSI aside, if a horizontal drag means add, why not just make vertical drag mean merge. Not a fan of voice interaction generally, but it's something we'll all be grateful for as we get older. No need to accelerate it
__MatrixMan__ 5mo ago
I've been iterating on some 3D models for various wacky garage projects I have. It's fun. I've often wished I could click on an arbitrary place and say "add an eye bolt here" or somesuch. Of course learning proper cad software is probably the right thing here, but having Claude write python scripts which generate HTML files which reference three.js to provide a 3d view has gotten me surprisingly far. If something could take my pointer click and reverse whatever coordinate transforms are between the source code and my screen such that the model sees my click in terms of the same coordinate system it's writing python in, well that would be pretty slick.
- accurrent 5mo ago
  Hah, Ive been thinking the same thing. Recently I prototyped a 2d paint app to validate the idea using chrome's Prompt API: https://arjo129.github.io/apps/voice_paint.html https://arjo129.github.io/apps/voice_paint.html Honestly what'd be epic is if this could be made to work with a XR headset. Imagine using the headset to capture the piece you are working on and generating saying "hey can you drill some holes over here"?
  - __MatrixMan__ 5mo ago
    That would be pretty excellent. We need a layer agnostic notion of "here". Until then I've just had it list every surface in a legend, each colored differently, so I can say "three inches down from the top of pole six, and rotate it so the hoop part of the bolt faces northwest."
ivanjermakov 5mo ago
I spent quite some effort to _completely_ get rid of mouse usage in my computer workflows and I believe it paid off.
etchalon 5mo ago
I don't understand why we need to move from an explicit operation like, say, circling something, to a fuzzy one where you have to hope the machine understands what you're pointing at. I also don't think people want to constantly talk to their computers.
- xigoi 5mo ago
  > I also don't think people want to constantly talk to their computers. People don’t. Tech companies think they do.
footy 5mo ago
you can really tell the people building these tools spend a lot of time alone. I work from a home office 90% of the time and I wouldn't want this to be my workflow. I don't want to talk to my computer, I want to listen to music while I work, and I want to not sound deranged and disturb everyone around me when I am working from a coffeeshop or the open-plan office or the airport or the train or whatever. and that's aside from the obvious privacy problems.
- order-matters 5mo ago
  yeah, i understand the frustration of needing to do all the communication through typing and clicking and that it can feel limiting - but i want the computer to be less demanding of my physical reality not more. i want to be able to talk to someone on the phone, work on something ith my hands, and still successfully manage my compute tasks. improvement can only be made by requiring less attention to hte screen and less hand movements, not adding in anything new like voice
  - skydhash 5mo ago
    > i want to be able to talk to someone on the phone, work on something with my hands, and still successfully manage my compute tasks. Maybe you can share a scenario for that one? I can’t figure a scenario where all of this needs to be true. It seems like a recipe for accidents.
    - duskdozer 5mo ago
      It's not exactly "compute tasks" in this sense, but online gaming is similar. People are constantly talking to each other while managing multiple other kb/mouse inputs at the same time.
    - order-matters 5mo ago
      well to start, im not sure what the magical new input would be that doesnt involve hands or voice, but for conversation lets assume its magic. the ideal is that i can use magic input to manage cloud compute through my phone, and that leaves me hands free to exercise and listen to music, or play video games, or hold a baby in a quiet room, and still manage tasks. realistically what would be best is flexible inputs. voice input is often neutered by being only voice, or requiring a click activation and click to stop recording, is part of the trouble. Getting a "magic" input is not as hard as it seems, if you reduce its input space as not needing to compete with keyboards and voice. a workflow could involve an assistant making suggestions and then the magic input needs only be a yes/no which could be head nod / shake, eye tracking & blinking, foot pedals, hand gestures honestly though i think the real quality of life improvement is going to come from OS's enabling multiple focus windows to be active simultaneously with multiple input devices. like what i really want is a keyboard that can act as 10+ virtual keyboards with a way to change which one is in use, and then based on which one is in use the inputs go directly to an app that is in focus for that input. let my game controller stay inputting into the game while i type something, or toggle my voice input to talk to an AI and not transmit to discord while im doing that. or i just get two keywords and two mice and splitscreen games with m&k input with another person next to me to two instances of the game running (one on each of two monitors), or the mic recognizes my partners voice as a separate input from my voice and managed independently there is so much that could be done with interface beyond layout and menus even regardless of AI, but AI related tools could help with mapping different voices into different virtual inputs, or recognizing keywords to do the same
protocolture 5mo ago
please leave the pointer alone. Hes been with us so long without enshittification.
throwuxiytayq 5mo ago
Nice, cute, silly little feel-good demo so that we can all pretend like we’re all going to be making decisions and micro-managing AIs by pointing at things in 5 years. It’s going to be great! The future is bright!
amelius 5mo ago
Reimagine the chat interface first. For example, let the user click where the LLM went off the rails.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
walrus01 5mo ago
Can I use this AI mouse pointer to tell the difference between hotdog or not hotdog?
- Legend2440 5mo ago
  Indeed you could!
kixiQu 5mo ago
I'm pretty sure all these models have terms of service that make the user assert that they have permission to use the content you're feeding into them (clickwrap infringement-is-the-user's-fault). This kind of integration makes a mockery of that.
PufPufPuf 5mo ago
That example with the recipe is funny. Did they really need AI to copy two lines and then compute 2×1?
ekjhgkejhgk 5mo ago
Thank I hate it.
- pyaamb 5mo ago
  If its offline I love it. Otherwise I hate it.
elteto 5mo ago
The image editing demo was fun... the model is not very well censored.
dwa3592 5mo ago
I tried it in ai studio and it was extremely disappointing. It did not follow the directions. I pointed at the door of the sand castle and said make the door of the sand castle bigger. it created another very big sand castle on the side. Then i pointed at one flag of the castle and said turn this flag into a blue flag. It turned two other random flags to blue but the one i pointed the pointer at.
righthand 5mo ago
Google made a Microsoft Kinect.
jaredcwhite 5mo ago
Haha, April Fools! Good one. Wait…it's May. Ugh, I'm so confused. :spiral eyes emoji:
devhouse 5mo ago
What I actually would be more willing to allow is a version of this that is built into macOS, runs locally, never phones home. If Apple Intelligence made an "AI sees everything on my screen", I might turn it on.
ImaCake 5mo ago
I think this falls flat for a technical audience because we already know how to do this stuff. But there are a lot of people who don't know how to copy paste, or use reverse image search, or apply a filter to a table. Being able to use plain language to do these things is a game changer for them. Sure, it's inefficient and inelegant but it's an interface that will do for basic technical stuff what the ipad touch screen did for the mouse and keyboard.
- 8note 5mo ago
  one step back, both for technical and non technical, is the knowledge that thats even a problem that you have. the agent occasionally spots your real problem like an experienced engineer
- fatata123 5mo ago
  [dead]
goosejuice 5mo ago
I don't see how the examples given are much better than just natural language. With support for chaining multiple thought+capture then this could be pretty expressive and a nice accessible tool. I could see how eye gaze could be incorporated as well.
chatmasta 5mo ago
I’m having flashbacks to Windows 7 gadgets. I can already imagine some developer marketplace for creating cursor prompts.
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torben-friis 5mo ago
Do you know the deep frustration of watching a tech illiterate person use a PC? When they type google in the omnibar and click on Google.com for every search, for example? Now you get to hear every person in the office do that around you. Like, good tech, but do googlers live in the real world? Do they genuinely like the idea of an open office full of people talking to their computers? Do they all live alone without human contact?
andrethegiant 5mo ago
don't mess with the mouse
AuthAuth 5mo ago
All these problems dont need a conversation with an AI to solve. If you make the text selectable then you can do these actions fast and efficiently. This only becomes a product as they make the web shittier and less friendly towards PC workflows. Its wild that they even put this out as a demo. It should have been picked apart in the internal meeting. There is no way I'd ever show my product taking 5s to change a 1 to a 2 in a piece of text that the user was already hovering or taking 10s to drag and drop a line of text from one box to another. Even the image of finding a route between two images could be done quick if images were auto OCR'd which is a setting on most image viewers.
promiseofbeans 5mo ago
Their video demo is interesting. If that was to be useful, it would need to work on sites like Netflix. And for that to work, they would presumably have to axe drm. I am fully in favour of removing the pointless energy tax we pay as a society for the highly flawed and ineffective system of video drm. Unless of course, their AI gets the same special privileges as the gpu in accessing drm content, and everything else is still locked out.
adrianwaj 5mo ago
I like the idea of a touch screen that you don't touch. Just a few centimeters(variable) off would be fine - they do exist but I've never used one. I think what's required is a way to slightly flex one finger to activate cursor movement, then pinky/thumb twitch to button press. Maybe wear two magnetic silicone nail bands? Current air-touch technologies seem complex and power-hungry, I don't know. Would be tiresome though to hold hand out all day - but good for mobile and handwriting/drawing. Need zero latency. Furthermore, the mousepad could become the magnetic sensor and not the screen in order to rest the palm. The nail bands then become the equivalent of the mouse so it's a hall effect mouse. But could the pad detect finger twitch for the buttons, though?
TonyAlicea10 5mo ago
At the core this is recreating the right click via voice. Interesting but not “reimagining” anything. I think the real story here is how vibe coding now enables flashy demo sites like this to be built for a concept that hasn’t yet earned it.
Nathanba 5mo ago
Kind of incredible how consistently terrible Google is at everything they do in the AI space. So they choose this demo and write a big blog post and advertise.. and the demo is horrible, doesn't work. Doesn't track what I circle with the mouse, just apparently where the mouse pointer landed at the end and only exactly where it landed. Multiple times it said "Got it, I'll move this empty space between the clouds over here" or "Got it, I'll convert this empty area to a sunhat" despite my mouse only being a few pixels next to an actual hat.
IG_Semmelweiss 5mo ago
50yr old tech (mouse) still hangs around because it is effective. Whatever this Google slop is, will likely not replace mice. The mouse has been successful at passing the test of time. Most of Google's own hardware products don't last 1/20th of that time. There's a reason chairs are still around. They are +2000 years old. Its still waiting to be replaced. One should be extremely skeptical of claims of replacing tech that has been around for a very long time.
- xigoi 5mo ago
  You’re just giving them ideas for AI chairs.
vjvjvjvjghv 5mo ago
I think combining voice and mouse will be perfect for a lot of design work like photo editing or CAD. Like pointing at an edge and saying “put a 2mm chamfer here”. To me this would be a really nice workflow c
invalidSyntax 5mo ago
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ElenaDaibunny 5mo ago
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chamomeal 5mo ago
Kinda related, but this reminded me of the guy who made a voice controlled text editing language. It's kinda like vim with your voice. Super cool talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcUJnmBqHTY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcUJnmBqHTY
ungreased0675 5mo ago
To me, this is a bizarre and weird way of using a computer, but I’m glad they’re doing research and trying new things.
SilverSurfer972 5mo ago
If we want to close Human <-> Machine loop as much as possible(pre-neuralink). Assuming that today the most efficient way for human to transfer information to machines is via voice. Assuming for machines to convey rich information to humans that's by printing html. Then a combination of screen + eye tracking + voice is all you need. The mouse doesn't make sense anymore. Links: https://x.com/trq212/status/2052809885763747935 https://x.com/trq212/status/2052809885763747935
iamcalledrob 5mo ago
Nitpick, but it bothers me: The human factors of their demo video don't stack up. Horizontal dragging with a mouse is actually really hard. Nobody's going to use it like that. Your arm can easily move your hand and cursor up/down by pivoting your shoulder, but there's no mechanism for left/right movement. It's always an arc. Or put another way: selection will be a lot slower and more tedious than the demo.
grumbelbart2 5mo ago
What is going on with the font in this article? My Firefox renders it as a wired mixture of lower- and upper-case letters, all with the same height. Completely unreadable. Culprint seems to be this: font-feature-settings: "ss02" on;
deleted 5mo ago
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scotty79 5mo ago
Just few days ago, I found myself marking a part of my screen with rectangle and pasting what's there into chatGPT to find out more about what was referenced there. This has a good utility.
imdsm 5mo ago
Actually don't hate the concept
jFriedensreich 5mo ago
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altern8 5mo ago
I can type pretty fast, so this seems like it would slow me down. Also, everyone in the office would get annoyed pretty quickly.
thih9 5mo ago
I guess Apple is taking notes and launching a version of that later in visionOS.
RamblingCTO 5mo ago
What a load of horsecrap. Google was never good at usability or UX. But that's a new low. This is ambiguous as it gets and good UX is opposite of that. If I need to undo half the stuff that happened or an AI starts to do stuff I don't want ot because I am moving my mouse in a certain way I'd just get angry and turn it off.
vicentwu 5mo ago
Good work! Context-awareness has huge potential. I don't think this demo hit the right mark, but it definitely shed some light.
lofaszvanitt 5mo ago
There must be some gargantuan blackhole around there that kills creativity.
lifis 5mo ago
Not clear what it actually does, but seems equivalent to a global right click menu with "Chat with AI about this"
jiehong 5mo ago
Now, with vim/helix key bindings: 1. select text 2. dictate action Feels very similar to Helix's select text and act on it. I think text selection could also be voice controlled (with a modal voice input), so one could say: "select sentence, action mode, copy and paste it in my list and remove duplicates"
wffurr 5mo ago
"Wiggle" the mouse cursor to do something - isn't this incredibly easy to trigger by accident? I remember turning on a "find cursor" mode in Windows once upon a time where it would zoom the mouse cursor on a wiggle, and it fired all the time by accident. Imagine an older person or child who is even less accurate with the mouse, too.
pshirshov 5mo ago
Could we play bullshit bingo? Bullshit! You don't need any new metaphors to support such (questionable) flows - at all. Swipes instead of selection rectangles are annoying - you don't see the traces of the swipes on these demo gifs! So, you've effectively "selected" something - but you have to keep in mind WHAT you selected. Total ridiculous bullshit.
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JV00 5mo ago
CLI is peak computing. No way this is more convenient than a terminal.
CivBase 5mo ago
They replaced the context menu with voice commands. They replaced cursor drag selection with a wavey gesture. They expect us to use LLMs for something as trivial as copy+paste. This reads like an April Fools joke. Even the title sounds like satire.
iandanforth 5mo ago
Deepmind hype is the worst hype. They do genuinely cool stuff and talk about it publicly, but don't make it available. Or it's only available to a tiny select few. Just shut up about the things you're doing until they are ready. You're part of a consumer products company, not a university PR department.
felixsebastian 5mo ago
i think it's beautiful
danielbusnz123 5mo ago
I started building an open-source Rust version of this idea for Linux/Hyprland last week, before the announcement. Different design (OS-level instead of browser-only, Anthropic Haiku 4.5 + Computer Use instead of Gemini, sub-3s release-to-speech). Code: github.com/danielbusnz-lgtm/aegis
beepbooptheory 5mo ago
This page forced me to hard reboot my whole (older, Android) phone?
exploderate 5mo ago
Ah wow, that must be the most expensive mouse pointer ever. I wonder if it can also click links. I just tell AI to "click this" and it will figure out what is under the pointer, query a graph of UI widgets and trigger a "click" event for me. Maybe with a sub-agent that has application context, "this is a browser". If we manage that, my plans for a pure XML based shell might not be too futuristic '<in><ls/></in><out><tree><file date="CDATA[...]">' ...
pronik 5mo ago
One thing I'm constantly baffled by in current technology is how it seems to be targeted at one pretty precise subset of human population: young, healthy, single people without any problems with perfectly pre-defined schedules and organized lives. Speaking English, having an OCD and being relatively wealthy is a bonus. Only when you live alone might you be comfortable constantly speaking with your devices. Only if your life if perfectly predefined can you let your fridge order the same food that just gone stale or has been eaten. And only when you are young and healthy and not in any way differing from the "standard" would you be capable of working like these "researchers" imagine you to. I'm not that person. I'm constantly failing at doing "triple-finger-taps" whenever I'm in need of one. I have a smartwatch with pedestrian navigation and never bothered to remember which vibration pattern means which turn. I don't configure different vibration patterns for different callers on the phone. I have a folding phone, but I almost never do side-by-side windows and when I do, I need to find out how to do that first -- and then how to leave that mode without losing my mind. I almost never use AI features on my phone not because I don't want to, but because I never remember how to activate them. I don't re-configure my gadgets to "fit my mood". I hate recommendations like "you like X, here's Y, it's the same!" I hate that I can't rest my mouse cursor on websites anymore without selecting something actionable, moving, animating or autoplaying. All of the examples on the linked page are workflows I would never do this way. I won't be talking to my shopping list to double the ingredients. I won't be drawing gestures with my mouse on a document to activate a voice command. I won't use voice commands in general because as it turns out, I'm not capable of bringing out a complete coherent sentence without pausing and/or changing my mind and/or realizing I'm wrong once. I appreciate those demos for the progress they are showing. It's impressive and astonishing to see restaurants getting extracted from videos or pictures getting expanded or text edited better than I ever could. It's all modern-day magic in a way. One thing it all isn't is a product. We don't have those anymore -- all we get are gimmicks. We don't do common interfaces anymore either, we are separating people in Google/Apple/Xiaomi camps. And most importantly we don't use that technology for good except for a bunch of people writing e-mails all day, doing shopping lists and booking one of top restaurants in Tokyo for the same evening on a whim. We are long overdue for a remake of "American Psycho", but this time it will be a documentary instead of a satire.
tim-projects 5mo ago
I looked at the first example and I'm astonished that they took a standard click and drag mouse move, injected the need to speak into an llm and then acted like it was revolutionary. Imagine trying to convince someone in the 90s that that's a step forward.

252 points by devhouse 5mo ago

strgrd 5mo ago

No thanks

delusional 5mo ago

Its like watching a demo from the old Xerox PARC, except everybody has only bad ideas. Like an opposite Xerox PARC.

walrus01 5mo ago
It's like a demo from Xerox PARC in an alternate universe where everything is run by marketing department MBAs. Oh wait, that's the one we live in now.

AbuAssar 5mo ago

so Google will be monitoring whatever on the screen continuously or only when the user say the magic words (this, that, here, there)?

EdgeExplorer 5mo ago
Indeed. "AI-enabled pointer" is misdirection. This isn't an AI-enabled pointer; it's sending screen to AI, which yes, includes pointer position. The AI doesn't live in the pointer. The AI lives, apparently, so thoroughly in the system that it can see and do anything, and the pointer is just a way of giving it context.
OtomotO 5mo ago
Google Recall. Hey, it's all about the marketing.

loaderchips 5mo ago

It's beautiful how the human mind can take something very obvious but overlooked and make it into this fantastic innovation. Fab stuff.

SirFatty 5mo ago

It only took Google and their AI offering to come up with Graffiti.

themafia 5mo ago

> We’ve been exploring new AI-powered capabilities to help the pointer not only understand what it’s pointing at, but also why it matters to the user. We couldn't quite track you well enough before. So we're fixing that under the guise of "AI powered capabilities."

deleted 5mo ago
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iridione 5mo ago

Interesting! I wonder how UI will evolve in the long-term? If there are browser-use/computer-use and clicky-clones automating pointer actions, do we really need complex UI anymore? If yes, when?

Ancapistani 5mo ago
I've been playing with writing a visionOS app that allows an AI agent to be aware of what you're looking at at any given time. At some point I fully expect eye tracking (or attention tracking) to be common enough to be a first-class input method.

mvdtnz 5mo ago

Both of the text based demos would have been simpler and faster with traditional mouse and keyboard interactions. What is the AI adding?

slopinthebag 5mo ago
It feels like everything modern is like this. No value added, just the appearance of it.
hyperhello 5mo ago
They’re going to take your abilities to do anything and spread it across many places so you have to run around to do them, same as all the moneyed technology.
dfxm12 5mo ago
It tracks what's on the screen and sends it back to Alphabet. If you're watching a video about BBQ, enjoy a bunch of ads for Omaha steaks and big green egg in your Gmail. On a less serious note, the audience for this is people who want to optimize for what seems like the least amount of effort.
wartywhoa23 5mo ago
Hype-flavored surveillance!
dieselgate 5mo ago
Yeah it's a gimmick
mrhottakes 5mo ago
> What is the AI adding? More $$$ for the PM who launched the product.
layer8 5mo ago
The AI is adding that you don’t need to provide a button or menu item or keyboard shortcut for each possible action, or for the user having to know that the command is there and how to access it. I prefer keyboard operation myself, but I can see how this could become useful in the future, for certain use cases. What would be useful as well then is if you could bind such a repeatedly-used AI command to button/menu item/keyboard shortcut in a way that it can still be used with pointing “this” and “that”.

mcookly 5mo ago

I wonder what sort of monstrous power would be unleashed if Google used Plan9 as a foundation.

bitwize 5mo ago
They'd half-finish it then bury it, like they did with Fuchsia which is heavily Plan-9-inspired.
- DonHopkins 5mo ago
  Google Plan 4.5

tintor 5mo ago

Of course, it isn't a Google Demo, if you can't use it to book a table at restaurant. (shown at the bottom of the page)

rhet0rica 5mo ago
My thoughts exactly. Why the fuck is this the primary concern of EVERY person who works at Google?!
- bitwize 5mo ago
  Aside from work—commerce, entertainment, and social communication are pretty much the only things most normies will ever use a computer for. Maybe light accounting and scheduling as well. This has been true since the 90s when the normie market for computers opened way up due to the internet becoming widely available, and companies have been demoing commercial applications for their equipment and software since then if not even before. Ordering food for delivery was the big one back then. Here's Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry ordering Chinese via fax with the new Windows 95 in 1995: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLlWrt-zmTo&t=685s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLlWrt-zmTo&t=685s I'm sure Don Hopkins can tell you a long annotated tale about the NeWS pizza ordering app that displayed a real-time dynamically-updated rotating pie on the screen as you filled out your order.
- cmrdporcupine 5mo ago
  What else can you do in the Bay Area sprawl other than work and go to restaurants? Is there anything else?

LocalH 5mo ago

do not want

jaccola 5mo ago

This seems like one of those things that is usable infrequently enough to be forgotten/poorly developed/never used. (Even before accounting for the actual failure rate of the LLM which will be none-zero). Perhaps a text box and file upload isn’t the perfect interface for every use case but it is versatile which is a huge barrier to overcome.

jinkuan 5mo ago

being able to make precise edits would be huge for AI

OtomotO 5mo ago

Like a dream come true... Nightmares are dreams as well and this is a nightmare like Windows Recall. Technically wonderful though.

nolist_policy 5mo ago

Wiggle at CAPTCHAs, wiggle at Termux, wiggle at Emacs, wiggle at the Godot Editor, wiggle at my remote desktop. (Not going to happen)

jpatten 5mo ago

Reminds me of Put That There https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RyBEUyEtxQo https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RyBEUyEtxQo

raphman 5mo ago
Ah, yes - I was trying to remember the name. Also featured in the Starfire vision video from 1992: https://youtu.be/jhe1DFY-SsQ?t=286 https://youtu.be/jhe1DFY-SsQ?t=286
- jpatten 5mo ago
  haha that's right I'd forgotten about that one!
benwen 5mo ago
Beat me to it! Back in 1980. Here’s the official link https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/put-that-there-voice-and-gesture-at-the-graphics-interface/ https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/put-that-there-voice-... And the paper https://dam-prod.media.mit.edu/uuid/8e6d934b-6c6f-48e4-b0a1-270e0dae745f https://dam-prod.media.mit.edu/uuid/8e6d934b-6c6f-48e4-b0a1-...
DonHopkins 5mo ago
Ah yes, the spiritual progenitor of MacPlaymate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacPlaymate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacPlaymate >The game features a panic button that when clicked on will cover the computer screen with a fake spreadsheet. The player can also choose to print out Maxie's current pose as a pinup. https://archive.org/details/mac_MacPlaymate https://archive.org/details/mac_MacPlaymate Geraldo interviews Chuck Farnham about getting sued by Playboy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42571845 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42571845 https://www.upi.com/Archives/1989/02/09/Playboy-sues-over-sexy-computer-game/6887603003600/ https://www.upi.com/Archives/1989/02/09/Playboy-sues-over-se...

kjellsbells 5mo ago

I sense a privacy problem brewing. It reminds me of Microsoft Recall in the sense that some portion of the screen is going to be continuously transmitted outside of the users control. What happens when someone browses something very private (planning a surprise engagement. looking at medical data. planning a protest)? All that data gets slurped to google and subject to a warrant or discovery or building your advertising fingerprint. Maybe the idea is that the data is sent to AI only when you right click, but that seems like a very thin firewall that a product manager will breach in the interests of delivering "predictive AI" via some kind of precomputed results.

mrhottakes 5mo ago
> What happens when someone browses something very private? Profit!
accurrent 5mo ago
At some point I hope that we will reach a point where these megacorps figure that running these things locally might be most cost effective. FWIW I think local models I run on my MacBook are good enough for most of the tasks that this kind of interaction may ask for.
xigoi 5mo ago
That’s the whole point. Users who want this “feature” will give Google permission to permanently record their screen.

simondw 5mo ago

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but what is new about the pointer itself? Seems to be functionally the same as selecting + tooltips / context menus.

kwertyoowiyop 5mo ago
Shush, how is anyone going to get promoted with that kind of talk!?
DaiPlusPlus 5mo ago
> but what is new about the pointer itself? I'm hoping for a const-reference joke.

SirMaster 5mo ago

Thanks, I hate it

why_at 5mo ago

My first impression coming away from this is skepticism. Anything with voice controls for routine use is a pretty tough sell. Doing this when you're not completely alone would be annoying to everyone around you. Most of their examples seem like they could have been done with a right click drop down menu so they don't really need to "re-invent the mouse pointer". So is this thing talking to Google's servers all the time for the AI integration? So it won't work if you're not connected to the internet? Privacy concerns are obvious; now Google wants to have an AI watching literally everything you do on your computer? Does it cost the user anything for the LLM use? If it's free will it stay free forever? That's quite a lot to give away if they're expecting people to use it to change a single word like in one of their examples. I guess they're expecting to make the money back by gathering data about literally everything you do on your computer. There might be a killer app for AI integration with personal computers that has yet to be invented, but this doesn't look like it.

nolist_policy 5mo ago
The "Edit an Image" Demo at the bottom is pretty fun. Maybe this is just Google flexing their LLM inference capacity.
- maccard 5mo ago
  That demo was an absolute disaster for me on Firefox on mac. It just fundamentally didn't work - the voice wasway behind my pointer, there were multiple agents speaking over each other saying conflicting things, and it couldn't even move the crab to the bottom right of the image. Embarassingly bad I would say!
AirMax98 5mo ago
Right — it does seem cool but the voice is patching over a major gap. If I'm talking already, why wouldn't I just describe what I'm looking at and have the AI grab it for me?
- xg15 5mo ago
  I think they answer that question pretty convincingly: Because if what you're looking at is already on the screen, it much more easy to point to it and say "that" than to describe it. (And if it's an abstract entity like a file, it might not even be possible to describe it, short of rattling off the entire file path)

brgsk 5mo ago

what the hell is going on at google

ori_b 5mo ago
AI.

Joker_vD 5mo ago

Just seven hours ago there was a plea on HN [0] to please not do this. Seriously, what are they smoking at Google right now? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48107027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48107027

pmarreck 5mo ago

There's already a product that does this lol Aaaaand now I can't remember the name of it

hmokiguess 5mo ago

Don't build these things, instead build protocols and expose system level APIs for application developers to build things.

arjie 5mo ago

Oh interesting, this is very cool. At first I thought it was just focus-follows-mouse but it's more interesting. You have certain keywords trigger "add to prompt". Ignoring the voice functionality (which is admittedly crucial currently because other inputs currently take over focus), I've often wanted to just have a continuous conversation with the LLM as I 'point and click' (or tab over and select) at various things. Might be neat to have text input focus continue to go to the LLM where I'm typing text etc. Sometimes I go to a different page to take a screenshot and other times I'm browsing for a file, and other times I'm highlighting some log lines. Cursor did this well, with selecting text in the terminal auto-focusing the Cursor agent textbox so you could talk to the agent and then select some text and you didn't have to re-select the original agent textbox again. The agent is a top-level function in that system not "just another app I have to switch to" to take my context with. I have some small amount of bias because I've always felt input-constrained on computers. I have to move my hands to go places and that's exasperating. I've tried head tracking, had a vim pedal for a while, and used tiling WMs, and things like this to aid but while my vim-fu is pretty good and I function inside things very well with it, my cross-application interface isn't. In the end, perhaps we all have our home offices with our Apple Vision Pros and we talk to them like this to maneouvre faster through our machines and get our ideas into them. Cool research. I wonder what we'll end up with.

skydhash 5mo ago
> I have some small amount of bias because I've always felt input-constrained on computers. I have to move my hands to go places and that's exasperating. I've tried head tracking, had a vim pedal for a while, and used tiling WMs, and things like this to aid but while my vim-fu is pretty good and I function inside things very well with it, my cross-application interface isn't Why not constrain your computing? It will require some programming chops, but you can note down your common tasks, figure out where actual input are required, and automate the rest.
- arjie 5mo ago
  I can only conclude that I don't have the programming + product chops to figure out what is truly the common element that can be automated.

juancn 5mo ago

Please don't. I like text selection exactly how it is. I want precise controls. It's fine for a touch interface like a phone, but on a computer I expect precision. As much as I can get.

xiphias2 5mo ago

Google needs to beat OpenAI and Antropic in coding models because that's where the big money is going. I love using the Gemini pro model for quick questions, but that's not where I'm spending the real money. They have so many great software engineers but unable to use them to speed up coding AI research. Hopefully with Sergey's focus it will get better. This cursor thing is just another experiment nobody cares about.

maheenaslam 5mo ago

The concept is good but accuracy in cluttered environment can be a concern, also misinterpreting context can be a problem

chromacity 5mo ago

My reaction to the first demo (recipe) is that it was slower than typing the same thing on your keyboard. The second demo seems to be a wash: there's no time saved in saying "move this" versus "move crab". And an app-specific contextual menu would probably be faster. The third demo doesn't seem to warrant the use of a pointer at all, since there is only one way to interpret the prompt. None of this means that this approach will not be successful, but there's a reason why so many attempts to revolutionize user interfaces ended up going nowhere. Talking to your computer was always supposed to be the future, but in practice, it's slower and more finicky than typing. In fact, the only new UI paradigm of the past 28+ years appears to have been touchscreens and swipe gestures on phones. But they are a matter of necessity. No one wants to finger-paint on a desktop screen.

joe5150 5mo ago
Talking to your computer can only ever work for people in atomized work-from-home silos, surely. I can't really imagine living in a world where everybody is just muttering commands to the computer all the time.
- bonsai_spool 5mo ago
  This happens daily in radiology departments around the world
  - zbentley 5mo ago
    Aren’t radiologists dictating notes rather than issuing commands to the computer? From supporting them for a few years, I recall them having pretty good facility using the computer to zoom/filter/isolate parts of images, and most of the muttering was speech to text or a good old tape recorder for their writeups.
    - bonsai_spool 5mo ago
      The dictation happens while reviewing images and the dictation software includes support for voice macros ranging from edits to adding information from the chart and other applications. Not quite the same as just recording.

dandaka 5mo ago

Next generation of OS should have constant video and audio recognition by on device LLM. This will provide valuable context for a lot of scenarios. So instead of frequent copy-pasting we are used to, we can let agents access context of our whole workflows from different apps. But Google is a very ill positioned candidate for such OS. I would rather trust Apple and local-first on-device models.

mrhottakes 5mo ago
Next generation OS should absolutely -not- have always-on surveillance like you describe.
- Legend2440 5mo ago
  It's not surveillance if it's on-device.
  - DonHopkins 5mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance >Sousveillance (/suːˈveɪləns/ soo-VAY-lənss) is the recording of an activity by a member of the public, rather than a person or organisation in authority, typically by way of small wearable or portable personal technologies.[14] The term, coined by Steve Mann,[15] stems from the contrasting French words sur, meaning "above", and sous, meaning "below", i.e. "surveillance" denotes the "eye in the sky" watching from above, whereas "sousveillance" denotes bringing the means of observation down to human level, either physically (by mounting cameras on people rather than on buildings) or hierarchically (with ordinary people observing, rather than by higher authorities or by architectural means).[16][17][23]
    - dandaka 5mo ago
      The goal is not to record activities of others, it is to have full context of operator activity. More like a personal knowledge base, that camera pointing to a cop.
- 5mo ago

gobdovan 5mo ago

This is how I always imagined FE development would work once ChatGPT 3 came out. Then Cursor appeared and seeing how successful they were with just a chat and a few tool calls, I thought I was over-complicating things. Anyway, I built a prototype on this idea, but instead of relying only on hover, I press Option to select a node in a custom AST-ish semantic layer I designed around a minimalist UI grammar, and Option + up/down arrows to move to parent/child node. This way, I have have an accurate pointer to the element I want to talk about, plus a minimal context window (parent component, state, a few navigation related queries). What I learned from using it, though, is that the killer use case isn't necessarily the flashy "talk to this UI element" interaction shown in the Google demos. I do use it that way too; I have `Option + Shift + click` to copy a selector to the clipboard, so I can give an LLM connected to the live medium a precise reference to the element I want to discuss. But the place where it has been most useful day to day is much simpler: source navigation. Point at the thing in the UI, jump to the code that is responsible for it. The difficult part is jumping to the code you care about (the code for UI or for the semantic element?), but in my system that distinction turned out to be usually obvious, which is what makes the interaction useful.

ianbicking 5mo ago

I've been doing something similar to this in a personal claude code frontend, though not particularly "magical". I'm mostly using my system to make comments on long AI-generated documents (especially design documents). I find it works well to have the AI generate something, and then I read through it, making comments along the way. You can get pretty far just repeating the things you see... "I'm reading [heading] and [comments]". But I do find some use in selecting content and saying "I don't agree with this" or whatever else. The result is just an augmented message. It looks like: <transcript> Let's see what we've got here. <selection doc="proposal.md" location="paragraph 3"> The system already... </selection> No, I don't like how this is approaching the problem, ... </transcript> Then I just send this as a user message. Claude Code (and I'm guessing any of the agentic systems) picks up on the markup very easily. It also helps to label it as a transcript, as it can understand there may be errors, and things like spelling and punctuation are inferred not deliberate. (Some additional instruction is necessary to help it understand, for example, that it should look for homophones that might make more sense in context.) It makes reviewing feel pretty relaxed and natural. I've played around with similar note taking systems, which I think could be great for studying in school, but haven't had the focus on that particular problem to take it very far. But I think the best thing really is giving the agent a richer understanding of what the user is experiencing and doing and just creating a rich representation of that. The keywords can be useful, but almost only as checkpoints: a keyword can identify the moment to take the transcript and package it up and deliver it. One difference perhaps in design motivation: I have really embraced long latency interactions. I use ChatGPT with extended thinking by default, and just suck it up when the answer didn't really require thinking. I deliver 10 points of feedback at once instead of little by little. (Often halfway through I explicitly contradict myself, because I'm thinking out loud and my ideas are developing.) I just don't stress out about latency or feedback, and so low-latency but lower-intelligence interactions don't do it for me (such as ChatGPT's advanced voice mode, or probably Thinking Machine's work). I think this focus is in part a value statement: I'm trying to do higher quality work, not faster work.

8note 5mo ago
this is pretty built in with vscode plugins. you select text in vscode, and write a comment, and the llm gets both

1970-01-01 5mo ago

How about you give me my normal white cursor and an "AI enhanced" orange cursor only when I'm doing AI things. To use their words, that would be "intuitive AI that meets users across all the tools they use, without interrupting their flow"

botanrice 5mo ago

while these examples might be easy fodder for criticism I do feel like this whole idea of talking to an LLM across multiple applications and anything your pointer is on will give it context is pretty powerful and cool idea. I'm imagining a webpage with a link - instead of opening a new link to quickly google something or opening three new tabs based on hyperlinks, i can point at a paragraph or line and ask it to tell me about it. Maybe I can point at a song on Spotify and have it find me the youtube video, or vice versa (of course this is assuming a tool like this wouldn't stay locked into one ecosystem.. which it will). Point is that the concept of talking to the computer with mouse as pointer is pretty cool and i guess a step closer to that whole sci-fi "look at this part of the screen and do something"

holoduke 5mo ago
Yeah. We just need 10x more compute. But constant ai analysing of everything is the ultimate direction.
- botanrice 5mo ago
  I wonder what the smallest, still practical, application of this would be now if you could implement it locally on your machine assuming you have decent hardware. Maybe something with the file system? Like hover over any file and instead of seeing a snapshot or some details/metadata you could get a quick 1-2 line sentence on what it is. I suppose you may want to have that saved somewhere as well to cache it... but I'm def not an expert. This would solve the always difficult issue of finding that one document! I still have trouble with document search on both mac & windows OS sometimes.
Nathanba 5mo ago
I agree that AI audio interfaces will be the future but not because they are better UIs for users as we understand the term "user" today. The future users of UI are not users of UI at all, they want nothing to do with learning UI or what buttons to press or where to type something. They want to go to the shopping site and instead of typing anything into a search field they want to say "Find me some boots for the summer, I wanna look fresh" and then tell it to complete the purchase via voice as well once it found something. At most they'll still click some filters in the results page and on individual results but that will be it.

homeonthemtn 5mo ago

This is pretty neat

justvugg 5mo ago

really interesting! This change now fits a faster UX and use.

robot-wrangler 5mo ago

A zigzag merge gesture is obviously a terrible idea until/unless everything is a touch screen. Did they even think about this stuff at all? Ergonomics and RSI aside, if a horizontal drag means add, why not just make vertical drag mean merge. Not a fan of voice interaction generally, but it's something we'll all be grateful for as we get older. No need to accelerate it

__MatrixMan__ 5mo ago

I've been iterating on some 3D models for various wacky garage projects I have. It's fun. I've often wished I could click on an arbitrary place and say "add an eye bolt here" or somesuch. Of course learning proper cad software is probably the right thing here, but having Claude write python scripts which generate HTML files which reference three.js to provide a 3d view has gotten me surprisingly far. If something could take my pointer click and reverse whatever coordinate transforms are between the source code and my screen such that the model sees my click in terms of the same coordinate system it's writing python in, well that would be pretty slick.

accurrent 5mo ago
Hah, Ive been thinking the same thing. Recently I prototyped a 2d paint app to validate the idea using chrome's Prompt API: https://arjo129.github.io/apps/voice_paint.html https://arjo129.github.io/apps/voice_paint.html Honestly what'd be epic is if this could be made to work with a XR headset. Imagine using the headset to capture the piece you are working on and generating saying "hey can you drill some holes over here"?
- __MatrixMan__ 5mo ago
  That would be pretty excellent. We need a layer agnostic notion of "here". Until then I've just had it list every surface in a legend, each colored differently, so I can say "three inches down from the top of pole six, and rotate it so the hoop part of the bolt faces northwest."

ivanjermakov 5mo ago

I spent quite some effort to _completely_ get rid of mouse usage in my computer workflows and I believe it paid off.

etchalon 5mo ago

I don't understand why we need to move from an explicit operation like, say, circling something, to a fuzzy one where you have to hope the machine understands what you're pointing at. I also don't think people want to constantly talk to their computers.

xigoi 5mo ago
> I also don't think people want to constantly talk to their computers. People don’t. Tech companies think they do.

footy 5mo ago

you can really tell the people building these tools spend a lot of time alone. I work from a home office 90% of the time and I wouldn't want this to be my workflow. I don't want to talk to my computer, I want to listen to music while I work, and I want to not sound deranged and disturb everyone around me when I am working from a coffeeshop or the open-plan office or the airport or the train or whatever. and that's aside from the obvious privacy problems.

order-matters 5mo ago
yeah, i understand the frustration of needing to do all the communication through typing and clicking and that it can feel limiting - but i want the computer to be less demanding of my physical reality not more. i want to be able to talk to someone on the phone, work on something ith my hands, and still successfully manage my compute tasks. improvement can only be made by requiring less attention to hte screen and less hand movements, not adding in anything new like voice
- skydhash 5mo ago
  > i want to be able to talk to someone on the phone, work on something with my hands, and still successfully manage my compute tasks. Maybe you can share a scenario for that one? I can’t figure a scenario where all of this needs to be true. It seems like a recipe for accidents.
  - duskdozer 5mo ago
    It's not exactly "compute tasks" in this sense, but online gaming is similar. People are constantly talking to each other while managing multiple other kb/mouse inputs at the same time.
  - order-matters 5mo ago
    well to start, im not sure what the magical new input would be that doesnt involve hands or voice, but for conversation lets assume its magic. the ideal is that i can use magic input to manage cloud compute through my phone, and that leaves me hands free to exercise and listen to music, or play video games, or hold a baby in a quiet room, and still manage tasks. realistically what would be best is flexible inputs. voice input is often neutered by being only voice, or requiring a click activation and click to stop recording, is part of the trouble. Getting a "magic" input is not as hard as it seems, if you reduce its input space as not needing to compete with keyboards and voice. a workflow could involve an assistant making suggestions and then the magic input needs only be a yes/no which could be head nod / shake, eye tracking & blinking, foot pedals, hand gestures honestly though i think the real quality of life improvement is going to come from OS's enabling multiple focus windows to be active simultaneously with multiple input devices. like what i really want is a keyboard that can act as 10+ virtual keyboards with a way to change which one is in use, and then based on which one is in use the inputs go directly to an app that is in focus for that input. let my game controller stay inputting into the game while i type something, or toggle my voice input to talk to an AI and not transmit to discord while im doing that. or i just get two keywords and two mice and splitscreen games with m&k input with another person next to me to two instances of the game running (one on each of two monitors), or the mic recognizes my partners voice as a separate input from my voice and managed independently there is so much that could be done with interface beyond layout and menus even regardless of AI, but AI related tools could help with mapping different voices into different virtual inputs, or recognizing keywords to do the same

protocolture 5mo ago

please leave the pointer alone. Hes been with us so long without enshittification.

throwuxiytayq 5mo ago

Nice, cute, silly little feel-good demo so that we can all pretend like we’re all going to be making decisions and micro-managing AIs by pointing at things in 5 years. It’s going to be great! The future is bright!

amelius 5mo ago

Reimagine the chat interface first. For example, let the user click where the LLM went off the rails.

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walrus01 5mo ago

Can I use this AI mouse pointer to tell the difference between hotdog or not hotdog?

Legend2440 5mo ago
Indeed you could!

kixiQu 5mo ago

I'm pretty sure all these models have terms of service that make the user assert that they have permission to use the content you're feeding into them (clickwrap infringement-is-the-user's-fault). This kind of integration makes a mockery of that.

PufPufPuf 5mo ago

That example with the recipe is funny. Did they really need AI to copy two lines and then compute 2×1?

ekjhgkejhgk 5mo ago

Thank I hate it.

pyaamb 5mo ago
If its offline I love it. Otherwise I hate it.

elteto 5mo ago

The image editing demo was fun... the model is not very well censored.

dwa3592 5mo ago

I tried it in ai studio and it was extremely disappointing. It did not follow the directions. I pointed at the door of the sand castle and said make the door of the sand castle bigger. it created another very big sand castle on the side. Then i pointed at one flag of the castle and said turn this flag into a blue flag. It turned two other random flags to blue but the one i pointed the pointer at.

righthand 5mo ago

Google made a Microsoft Kinect.

jaredcwhite 5mo ago

Haha, April Fools! Good one. Wait…it's May. Ugh, I'm so confused. :spiral eyes emoji:

devhouse 5mo ago

What I actually would be more willing to allow is a version of this that is built into macOS, runs locally, never phones home. If Apple Intelligence made an "AI sees everything on my screen", I might turn it on.

ImaCake 5mo ago

I think this falls flat for a technical audience because we already know how to do this stuff. But there are a lot of people who don't know how to copy paste, or use reverse image search, or apply a filter to a table. Being able to use plain language to do these things is a game changer for them. Sure, it's inefficient and inelegant but it's an interface that will do for basic technical stuff what the ipad touch screen did for the mouse and keyboard.

8note 5mo ago
one step back, both for technical and non technical, is the knowledge that thats even a problem that you have. the agent occasionally spots your real problem like an experienced engineer
fatata123 5mo ago
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goosejuice 5mo ago

I don't see how the examples given are much better than just natural language. With support for chaining multiple thought+capture then this could be pretty expressive and a nice accessible tool. I could see how eye gaze could be incorporated as well.

chatmasta 5mo ago

I’m having flashbacks to Windows 7 gadgets. I can already imagine some developer marketplace for creating cursor prompts.

deleted 5mo ago

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torben-friis 5mo ago

Do you know the deep frustration of watching a tech illiterate person use a PC? When they type google in the omnibar and click on Google.com for every search, for example? Now you get to hear every person in the office do that around you. Like, good tech, but do googlers live in the real world? Do they genuinely like the idea of an open office full of people talking to their computers? Do they all live alone without human contact?

andrethegiant 5mo ago

don't mess with the mouse

AuthAuth 5mo ago

All these problems dont need a conversation with an AI to solve. If you make the text selectable then you can do these actions fast and efficiently. This only becomes a product as they make the web shittier and less friendly towards PC workflows. Its wild that they even put this out as a demo. It should have been picked apart in the internal meeting. There is no way I'd ever show my product taking 5s to change a 1 to a 2 in a piece of text that the user was already hovering or taking 10s to drag and drop a line of text from one box to another. Even the image of finding a route between two images could be done quick if images were auto OCR'd which is a setting on most image viewers.

promiseofbeans 5mo ago

Their video demo is interesting. If that was to be useful, it would need to work on sites like Netflix. And for that to work, they would presumably have to axe drm. I am fully in favour of removing the pointless energy tax we pay as a society for the highly flawed and ineffective system of video drm. Unless of course, their AI gets the same special privileges as the gpu in accessing drm content, and everything else is still locked out.

adrianwaj 5mo ago

I like the idea of a touch screen that you don't touch. Just a few centimeters(variable) off would be fine - they do exist but I've never used one. I think what's required is a way to slightly flex one finger to activate cursor movement, then pinky/thumb twitch to button press. Maybe wear two magnetic silicone nail bands? Current air-touch technologies seem complex and power-hungry, I don't know. Would be tiresome though to hold hand out all day - but good for mobile and handwriting/drawing. Need zero latency. Furthermore, the mousepad could become the magnetic sensor and not the screen in order to rest the palm. The nail bands then become the equivalent of the mouse so it's a hall effect mouse. But could the pad detect finger twitch for the buttons, though?

TonyAlicea10 5mo ago

At the core this is recreating the right click via voice. Interesting but not “reimagining” anything. I think the real story here is how vibe coding now enables flashy demo sites like this to be built for a concept that hasn’t yet earned it.

Nathanba 5mo ago

Kind of incredible how consistently terrible Google is at everything they do in the AI space. So they choose this demo and write a big blog post and advertise.. and the demo is horrible, doesn't work. Doesn't track what I circle with the mouse, just apparently where the mouse pointer landed at the end and only exactly where it landed. Multiple times it said "Got it, I'll move this empty space between the clouds over here" or "Got it, I'll convert this empty area to a sunhat" despite my mouse only being a few pixels next to an actual hat.

IG_Semmelweiss 5mo ago

50yr old tech (mouse) still hangs around because it is effective. Whatever this Google slop is, will likely not replace mice. The mouse has been successful at passing the test of time. Most of Google's own hardware products don't last 1/20th of that time. There's a reason chairs are still around. They are +2000 years old. Its still waiting to be replaced. One should be extremely skeptical of claims of replacing tech that has been around for a very long time.

xigoi 5mo ago
You’re just giving them ideas for AI chairs.

vjvjvjvjghv 5mo ago

I think combining voice and mouse will be perfect for a lot of design work like photo editing or CAD. Like pointing at an edge and saying “put a 2mm chamfer here”. To me this would be a really nice workflow c

invalidSyntax 5mo ago

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ElenaDaibunny 5mo ago

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chamomeal 5mo ago

Kinda related, but this reminded me of the guy who made a voice controlled text editing language. It's kinda like vim with your voice. Super cool talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcUJnmBqHTY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcUJnmBqHTY

ungreased0675 5mo ago

To me, this is a bizarre and weird way of using a computer, but I’m glad they’re doing research and trying new things.

SilverSurfer972 5mo ago

If we want to close Human <-> Machine loop as much as possible(pre-neuralink). Assuming that today the most efficient way for human to transfer information to machines is via voice. Assuming for machines to convey rich information to humans that's by printing html. Then a combination of screen + eye tracking + voice is all you need. The mouse doesn't make sense anymore. Links: https://x.com/trq212/status/2052809885763747935 https://x.com/trq212/status/2052809885763747935

iamcalledrob 5mo ago

Nitpick, but it bothers me: The human factors of their demo video don't stack up. Horizontal dragging with a mouse is actually really hard. Nobody's going to use it like that. Your arm can easily move your hand and cursor up/down by pivoting your shoulder, but there's no mechanism for left/right movement. It's always an arc. Or put another way: selection will be a lot slower and more tedious than the demo.

grumbelbart2 5mo ago

What is going on with the font in this article? My Firefox renders it as a wired mixture of lower- and upper-case letters, all with the same height. Completely unreadable. Culprint seems to be this: font-feature-settings: "ss02" on;

deleted 5mo ago

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scotty79 5mo ago

Just few days ago, I found myself marking a part of my screen with rectangle and pasting what's there into chatGPT to find out more about what was referenced there. This has a good utility.

imdsm 5mo ago

Actually don't hate the concept

jFriedensreich 5mo ago

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altern8 5mo ago

I can type pretty fast, so this seems like it would slow me down. Also, everyone in the office would get annoyed pretty quickly.

thih9 5mo ago

I guess Apple is taking notes and launching a version of that later in visionOS.

RamblingCTO 5mo ago

What a load of horsecrap. Google was never good at usability or UX. But that's a new low. This is ambiguous as it gets and good UX is opposite of that. If I need to undo half the stuff that happened or an AI starts to do stuff I don't want ot because I am moving my mouse in a certain way I'd just get angry and turn it off.

vicentwu 5mo ago

Good work! Context-awareness has huge potential. I don't think this demo hit the right mark, but it definitely shed some light.

lofaszvanitt 5mo ago

There must be some gargantuan blackhole around there that kills creativity.

lifis 5mo ago

Not clear what it actually does, but seems equivalent to a global right click menu with "Chat with AI about this"

jiehong 5mo ago

Now, with vim/helix key bindings: 1. select text 2. dictate action Feels very similar to Helix's select text and act on it. I think text selection could also be voice controlled (with a modal voice input), so one could say: "select sentence, action mode, copy and paste it in my list and remove duplicates"

wffurr 5mo ago

"Wiggle" the mouse cursor to do something - isn't this incredibly easy to trigger by accident? I remember turning on a "find cursor" mode in Windows once upon a time where it would zoom the mouse cursor on a wiggle, and it fired all the time by accident. Imagine an older person or child who is even less accurate with the mouse, too.

pshirshov 5mo ago

Could we play bullshit bingo? Bullshit! You don't need any new metaphors to support such (questionable) flows - at all. Swipes instead of selection rectangles are annoying - you don't see the traces of the swipes on these demo gifs! So, you've effectively "selected" something - but you have to keep in mind WHAT you selected. Total ridiculous bullshit.

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JV00 5mo ago

CLI is peak computing. No way this is more convenient than a terminal.

CivBase 5mo ago

They replaced the context menu with voice commands. They replaced cursor drag selection with a wavey gesture. They expect us to use LLMs for something as trivial as copy+paste. This reads like an April Fools joke. Even the title sounds like satire.

iandanforth 5mo ago

Deepmind hype is the worst hype. They do genuinely cool stuff and talk about it publicly, but don't make it available. Or it's only available to a tiny select few. Just shut up about the things you're doing until they are ready. You're part of a consumer products company, not a university PR department.

felixsebastian 5mo ago

i think it's beautiful

danielbusnz123 5mo ago

I started building an open-source Rust version of this idea for Linux/Hyprland last week, before the announcement. Different design (OS-level instead of browser-only, Anthropic Haiku 4.5 + Computer Use instead of Gemini, sub-3s release-to-speech). Code: github.com/danielbusnz-lgtm/aegis

beepbooptheory 5mo ago

This page forced me to hard reboot my whole (older, Android) phone?

exploderate 5mo ago

Ah wow, that must be the most expensive mouse pointer ever. I wonder if it can also click links. I just tell AI to "click this" and it will figure out what is under the pointer, query a graph of UI widgets and trigger a "click" event for me. Maybe with a sub-agent that has application context, "this is a browser". If we manage that, my plans for a pure XML based shell might not be too futuristic '<in><ls/></in><out><tree><file date="CDATA[...]">' ...

pronik 5mo ago

One thing I'm constantly baffled by in current technology is how it seems to be targeted at one pretty precise subset of human population: young, healthy, single people without any problems with perfectly pre-defined schedules and organized lives. Speaking English, having an OCD and being relatively wealthy is a bonus. Only when you live alone might you be comfortable constantly speaking with your devices. Only if your life if perfectly predefined can you let your fridge order the same food that just gone stale or has been eaten. And only when you are young and healthy and not in any way differing from the "standard" would you be capable of working like these "researchers" imagine you to. I'm not that person. I'm constantly failing at doing "triple-finger-taps" whenever I'm in need of one. I have a smartwatch with pedestrian navigation and never bothered to remember which vibration pattern means which turn. I don't configure different vibration patterns for different callers on the phone. I have a folding phone, but I almost never do side-by-side windows and when I do, I need to find out how to do that first -- and then how to leave that mode without losing my mind. I almost never use AI features on my phone not because I don't want to, but because I never remember how to activate them. I don't re-configure my gadgets to "fit my mood". I hate recommendations like "you like X, here's Y, it's the same!" I hate that I can't rest my mouse cursor on websites anymore without selecting something actionable, moving, animating or autoplaying. All of the examples on the linked page are workflows I would never do this way. I won't be talking to my shopping list to double the ingredients. I won't be drawing gestures with my mouse on a document to activate a voice command. I won't use voice commands in general because as it turns out, I'm not capable of bringing out a complete coherent sentence without pausing and/or changing my mind and/or realizing I'm wrong once. I appreciate those demos for the progress they are showing. It's impressive and astonishing to see restaurants getting extracted from videos or pictures getting expanded or text edited better than I ever could. It's all modern-day magic in a way. One thing it all isn't is a product. We don't have those anymore -- all we get are gimmicks. We don't do common interfaces anymore either, we are separating people in Google/Apple/Xiaomi camps. And most importantly we don't use that technology for good except for a bunch of people writing e-mails all day, doing shopping lists and booking one of top restaurants in Tokyo for the same evening on a whim. We are long overdue for a remake of "American Psycho", but this time it will be a documentary instead of a satire.

tim-projects 5mo ago

I looked at the first example and I'm astonished that they took a standard click and drag mouse move, injected the need to speak into an llm and then acted like it was revolutionary. Imagine trying to convince someone in the 90s that that's a step forward.