AI-powered humans

Happy Thursday! Question: If you could only bring three pieces of tech to a deserted island, what would you bring? For me, it’s a phone, Starlink, and some kind of water desalination machine. 

Here’s some news: 

🧠 Neuralink, Elon’s brain chip startup, has shown a patient using it to play chess. 

💸 Reddit is set to IPO today with a stock price of $34 and a $5.4 billion valuation.

🌊 AI is helping to predict floods up to seven days in advance. according to this report by Google

Have you seen the movie Her? The plot centers around a man who falls in love with Samantha —an AI-powered virtual assistant who lives in a phone. 

When Her came out in 2013, the premise was still reasonably far-fetched. Publically-available AI was very much in its infancy, but now the idea of Samantha suddenly becomes very real. 

Vapi is a voice AI infrastructure tool built to allow developers to build, test, and deploy complex AI voice assistants in minutes instead of potentially months. It does this by being an API you can drop into your project with just a few lines of code. 

Once integrated, you can quickly customize it to suit a plethora of jobs like taking bookings at a barber shop, scheduling dental appointments, handling insurance claims — or whatever you need it to do, all via a human-like phone call. 

Vapi used Product Hunt’s new Shoutout feature to namedrop some of the tech that powers its services: Daily.co for its real-time voice infrastructure, GPT-3.5 and 4 for LLM capabilities, and Deepgram for speech recognition — all of which come together to power Vapi. 

You don’t have to be a developer to try it out. Vapi takes a more interactive approach to showing off the product by letting you have a full-fledged conversation with an assistant on its homepage. I spent at least 30 minutes chatting with it, and Interview Pen founder Benyam uploaded a video where he had an hour-long conversation with Vapi.

In today's interconnected world, no product stands alone. Unicorns and startups alike depend on different tools and services to keep things moving smoothly.

That's why we're excited to launch Shoutouts — A way to acknowledge the tools and teams that helped bring your product to life.

Whether it's a design tool like Figma, a groundbreaking AI like GPT-4, a marketing platform like Beehiiv, or even the coffee machine fueling your late nights, Shoutouts lets you express gratitude towards those who played a role in your product's development.

• LookAway is a Mac app designed to protect your eyes through regular screen breaks.
• SheetSavvy uses AI to help you save time when working with spreadsheets. 
• Albert AI lets you interact with ChatGPT without ever having to leave Slack.

• Velt is an API that lets you add commenting and collaboration to your app.
• Podwise AI transcribes, summarizes, and extracts insights from podcast episodes.
• Dub.co is an open-source link shortener built for marketing teams.