Bye, Siri

Aaron is out for the next couple of weeks, so this email is coming to you from Denver, Colorado. Let's see if you can tell an Irish writer from an American one.

📕Spotify rolled out e-learning in the UK with courses from Skillshare and more.

🐉Lego created a 3,745-piece DND set to celebrate the game's 50th anniversary.

🪽DoorDash is piloting fast-food delivery by drone.

Most of iOS users would agree — Siri sucks. YC President & CEO Garry Tan blames Apple’s closed system, recently tweeting that Siri's failure is due to "the sin of self preferencing and closed systems."

K, so how about an assistant that uses multiple LLMs?

Enter Martin, a new AI butler and iOS app. Martin not only comes with a delightfully posh British accent, he integrates with all the tools you already use, like your search engine, calendars, and emails.

The makers demoed a few promising features in Martin’s launch today, including letting you cc Martin into your email thread to schedule meetings for you, instead of bouncing back and forth between tools. He’ll also notice events on your calendar and preemptively help you prep for them, like finding you a restaurant for your dinner meeting and sending you popular menu items ahead of time.

One huge benefit to Martin is that he’s easily reachable by text, email, and voice. Martin’s founders shouted out Deepgram for helping make Martin's voice capabilities fast and accurate. They also noted using AI models Claude-3 and GPT-4 Turbo.

And yes, YC is putting its money and support where its mouth is. Martin is YC-backed; a part of the Summer 2023 cohort.

As for Siri, “she” might not be along much longer — at least, not by name. Researchers from Apple are working on getting their assistant to work without needing a trigger phrase like “Siri.”

Don’t worry, old girl. We won’t forget you.

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Love for Vercel is trending — newly launched products are calling out Vercel in their stacks. Check out this shoutout Vercel received from Otto Engineer, an autonomous AI software engineer that runs in the browser:

"Vercel's Next.js with React Server Components made it incredibly fast to prototype and iterate. This is the future of React."

Psst. Launching soon? Make a shoutout.

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