Launch HN: Martin (YC S23) – Using LLMs to Make a Better Siri

I want this, but very concerned about the security and privacy - you're talking about getting my most personal of personals (email, calendar, messages, phone calls). This could be a nightmare of privacy or security breaches. That's why I'm likely waiting for Apple's version within their corporate security and privacy commitments (and they already have my data). I don't see anything on the website about SOC2, or privacy commitments beyond a boilerplate policy?

I’m impressed. I’ll probably cancel ChatGPT Pro subscription and switch to this. It actually does what I want.

I’ve been putting it through its paces and it’s handling some complicated requests correctly the first time. For example:

“There is an art festival in my city this weekend. They have a jazz stage my wife and I would like to check out. Find the schedule for each day and create one event every day it’s happening. In the event description put the schedule for each day, and invite my wife.”

It got it right the first time. Pretty amazing.

I see some folks saying it’s just a “wrapper for an LLM” like that’s easy to do. LLMs are not faerie powder that just work for every use case. The personal assistant use case is extremely difficult, which is why the big players haven’t done it yet.

So bravo for the bravado and actually making it work. Privacy is a concern, but honestly I’m not that worried that you can find out which art festival I’ll be at this weekend. But an oncology appointment? I might.

You should create a system where you cannot access user data, and it can never be shared with third parties. Make that system open source to prove it. Give up the potential upside of using this data for revenue so that Martin becomes what it can be. Otherwise, I’ll never feel confident telling Martin anything I don’t want advertisers to know.

How do you make yourself future proof from Apple? Apple can just making Siri smarter and add integrations with tons of other softwares, apps, and hardwares?

Besides the obvious privacy concerns, I'm worried about dangers from it being invoked by someone else within voice range. I've always thought that's why the current Siri has limited abilities.

I'm sure it won't be long before we see apps that listen, record any "Hey Siri" they hear, and then synthesize that voice to give your phone commands to "tell me my passwords", or more insidious and difficult-to-detect commands.

It seems Apple's new version will be facing this problem too.

This is something I have been so desperately wanting that I thought I would build a hacky version for myself.

- How did you solve the long-term memory problem? What kind of issues are you facing with scaling the number of tools?

- I like the idea but there's one crucial thing missing for me. I will happily pay for your app if it lets me bring my own API keys/ endpoints for models that I can host, so that I know my data is private and secure.

Big fan of Martin personally. One of the few startups I enjoyed and then invested in. Mostly use it for creative brainstorming and talking through ideas. On a morning walk I can cycle through ideas and when I get back to my laptop I have a bunch of research done. Team has been cranking for a while so looking forward to the updates.

This looks really cool and impressive.

As someone who is very interested in using this, may I make two suggestions:

1. Have a list of integrations somewhere on the homepage. It might be there, but if so I missed it. I immediately wanted to know if it can integrate with Obsidian, for example, or Omnifocus. I'm sure others will want to know if "email" means Google only, or Outlook, etc.

2. Make the trial longer. When I see 7 days, what I immediately think is "not enough time to really test this". I'm a busy person, I'm not going to change habits overnight, and unless this thing will immediately integrate into my daily routine (it won't), I'll probably only use it casually the first few times. It would be much better to give me more time to test it. (This is not business advice - maybe I'm wrong and 7 days is better to actually convert users! I'm just giving my immediate reaction.)

I honestly don't understand why tech giants aren't doing this stuff.

On your homepage you have the call to action that goes to a Stripe page, but no real indication that it's an iOS-only application. If I was an excited Android user and went through the payment process only to find out it doesn't have an Android app I'd be very annoyed.

Anyway, a few thoughts...

1. I find the event planning stuff to be kind of stale. Like maybe it will be cool this time, but so far it's part of every demo and concept around AI assistants and it's never ACTUALLY been cool. I wish this was trying to be cool in a new way.

2. The turn-taking for voice input looks kind of awkward. I get why it has to be that way, and there's not really a better solution, but... well, maybe it would be possible to use visual output and voice input, or generally make them complement each other. Many details are better to show visually and can be tedious to listen to.

3. I like the patient and attentive secretary model more than the turn-taking chat. The confirmation turn-taking is a trust exercise (did the AI _really_ hear and understand what I said?) but I think there's other ways to handle that trust. Like being more trustworthy (modern non-streaming speech recognition works really well!), making things easy to undo, or detecting unlikely commands and require verification.

4. For example, when reviewing a to-do list, I'd rather it show the list and I can just say "yeah, I finished item 1 and 2, and I was able to pick up milk but there's still some other groceries I need to get for tonight" and have it complete and revise entries based on that.

5. Generally to-do and task management is 10x more interesting to me than calendaring. But you should have a theory, not just be a layer over something else. I should be able to break down tasks, complete subtasks, identify partial completion and have it identify the remaining portions, get suggestions on breakdown, get advice on which tasks to complete when, etc.

6. Another interesting thing would be a kind of personal database. I would love to be able to unload a lot of information from my head and know that it will be put someplace where it can be meaningfully retrieved, combined with other data, etc. Like if I have certain bill payments or house maintenance I want to remember or something, I don't want to turn that into calendar items. Lots of them aren't even fully articulated, or the structure will emerge as more information becomes available. But I want to get started before I have carefully defined the task, and an AI assistant could do that.

Дорогой Мартин Алексеевич![1]

1. https://languagehat.com/sorokins-norma/

Hate that you need a credit card to try it. Installed anyway, Martin just crashes. Does not load at all. Fail. iPhone 11, iOS 17.5.1. Location in Australia.

Sick demo - looks useful. I'd totally be down to try it out, but as a consumer product I don't really want to put my credit card down.

Very cool! Congrats on the launch. Is Martin able to respond to someone if they text back? Also what are some of the most commonly used integrations?

I don't know how these get funded by YC. I have followed YC from the beginning and it seems it funds so many of these startups on the "current thing" these days.

Maybe the founders they are funding are not diverse enough. Is there too much tracking on which universities they went to? So the same set is applying and getting funded?

I personally prefer a UI most of the time. It's higher fidelity and cuts through the inherent ambiguity of language.

The exception for me would be situations where I can't use my hands, like driving. I don't want to have to look at a screen. If a voice agent could replicate the functionality of CarPlay, that would be really useful.

Looks great guys! I'm working specifically on improving voice interfaces too. Maybe I can join you guys to help you out!

Also I feel you, about running into all of the challenges your facing with LLMs. We've run into quiet a few road blocks, but your comments summarises it the best. Just keep working on it step by step.

I just gave Martin a go. What I'm looking for is an AI PA that can:

- do some research on a given company/individual/website and give me a summary.

- preferably also identify a contact email.

- handle selecting a good time for meetings according to my availability and preferences.

- handle the communication with the other party.

- let me know when it is arranged, or if it's given up.

I signed up and gave it a UK phone number, and got a UK number back for texting Martin. I'm not sure why it has to be SMS when it could be an in-app chat. I was expecting to get a confirmation SMS or similar, but it just accepted it straight away. When I texted the number I was given (several times), it was delivered but there was no reply.

Martin sent me an email welcoming me. I replied asking it to set up a meeting for early next week with another email address. Martin replied saying it is unable to email people on my behalf, and suggested I set it up myself.

> Unfortunately, I am currently unable to send emails to other people on your behalf. However, you can easily send an email to ** to schedule the meeting for early next week in the afternoon.

I reminded Martin that there is an example on the website homepage of doing just that, and it replied saying it can indeed schedule meetings, and asked for the details again. I replied with the same details, and it confirmed the meeting was set up.

I checked my other email, and there was no message setting anything up. I told Martin that the other party needs to know about the email, and it replied with:

> Understood. I'll make sure to inform ** about the meeting details.

Still nothing received. Furthermore, I checked the app and I haven't even connected my calendar, so I'm surprised it didn't warn me or prompt me to do this when I asked for a meeting.

I gave up with that and decided to try something else. I forwarded Martin an email thread from a lead, which included a lot of back story on their organization, offering, and some areas that they think we could potentially collaborate on. I asked Martin to find out more about the company, and evaluate the options for collaboration.

This lead is in the AI space, with their primary product being a document digitisation solution to help surface and discover business documents.

Martin replied describing it as a "nearbound revenue platform to streamline revenue operations", with a key feature being "Automated lead scoring and distribution to prioritize high potential leads". As far as evaluating the collaboration opportunities, it instead gave me a list of collaboration features within the platform, none of which exist.

At the end, it linked to a blog post to their recent funding round. Except, the blog post was from a completely unrelated company with a similar name. Bear in mind that the originally forwarded email was from their business email account, and the body contained multiple links and references to their website.

I decided to try one more test, and asked it to do some research on my own business website and let me know what it finds out. It's been 20 minutes, and I haven't had a reply. I checked the app to see if there was any indication it's working on something for me, but nothing their either.

I love the idea of Martin, but I'll be canceling my trial - it just doesn't seem anywhere near ready yet - especially given I have to trust it to communicate on my behalf.

would love this, especially being in the EU where Apple Intelligence fearures might not be released or would need one of the latest devices, but 30$ a month is a big no no for me, i'd rather do my own implementation for a fraction of the price!

Will definitely try. Been tinkering with similar.

Want big $$$? Support exchange 365 via MS Graph API or whatever today's preferred api is.

Can actually use it to dictate something for me and customize it and then save it save it like how aqua voice does?

Big fan of what you guys are building! This looks like an amazing product that can help save a ton of time :)

From what I've read it seems Siri was intentionally kept where it is

What are you spending per user on API costs? 7 days free trial seems quite generous.

Congrats on the launch.

Please update the video to bleep out “Siri”

> * Something else Martin does which is unlike other voice assistants is it can have full text conversations with your contacts on your behalf from its own phone number. For example, you can tell it to plan a lunch with a friend, and it can text back and forth with that friend to figure out a time and place.*

If the contact thought they were talking to me, it would be fucking dystopian. I would immediately break contact with someone who gaslighted me with AI.

Please make some sort of pledge or guarantee that your company will never impersonate a human and that it will always identify itself as a machine when communicating with others.

$30 a month seems steep for an early stage product. I could get a few million tokens for that price :/

Sounds, will give it a try!

So is my data from all these apps being sent elsewhere? I don't want another spy tentacle.

On your YC page it lists three founders: Dawson, Harsh and Arjun. But Dawson is the only one listed pretty much everywhere else online. Does this mean the other two founders have quit, and if so I worry about sinking $30 into something which may not exist very soon.

what model are you using?

This looks really well done and I appreciate the real, live demo instead of some over produced bullshit.

Nice job!

Not trying to be rude, but… how is this a business? Apple is uniquely poised to deliver a solution here. I don’t see how a business could compete with that.

They even announced it during the WWDC this year.

Again, I’m a founder myself. Not trying to poopoo on this. I’m just curious how this idea has legs with all the might of Apple looking poised to crush this.

The YC folks must like you as founders because your business is 100% going to get eaten and you're going to be lucky to get aqui-hired. Get ready to pivot.

This looks awesome, so excited to try out the product!! Such a unique spin on the voice AI agents out there.