I always have my backpack with me, so if I need milk I can pick it up on the way back. And I am pretty sure that I have to notice if I need milk myself.
The tech sounds cool, but whenever I hear about actual applications, I don't see the point.
"Find me the cheapest ticket to Las Vegas for the first week of June. Buy one at anytime that you think is reasonable. Wait until no later than two months from now before buying. Get two tickets if my brother can also go".
"Email me if anyone posts a Sega multi mega for sale. But only if it's in black color".
I have no idea if OpenClaws can already do such a task or not, I don't have one, but it opens up new possibilities. If it isn't there yet, it will be.
That’s kind of the confusing thing for me, I wouldn’t have a human personal assistant do anything for me as long as any money is on the line. I couldn’t teach them my preferences well enough to trust them to do it the way I want, instead of just doing it myself.
Personal assistants only make sense to me if you’re so rich that money doesn’t really matter to you anyways.
Your trip booking thing for example is something I would never give to a human assistant.
The alert for stuff on sale can already be done on the usual price tracking websites.
The milk thing was just an example of a tool that can intelligently combine things for you, not a literal "it's a calendar with a milk function".
This is a bit like "if I want to call my friends, I have a phone a home, why would I need a mobile?" which somewhat betrays a lack of imagination.
My openclaw now searches for the relevant content upon her request, sends the URL to a Stacks docker instance, monitors the Stacks instance for when the download completes, grabs the resulting epub from a local file share, then sends it to her kindle email. She doesn’t even send me the request anymore; she sends them straight to the Discord bot.
It also corrects our calendar every night. She often just through something on the calendar like “[son’s name] speech”, but we have speech appointments in either of two locations, and I have a strong preference for calendar items in the format “[person] - activity”. If she puts the city name with the speech appointments (“[son’s name] speech [town]”), openclaw reformats the title accordingly and adds the physical address of the speech therapy office we go to in that town. This means Apple Calendar sends us notifications when it’s time to leave, instead of just 30 mins prior.
I have a few others as well, but those are real world examples. Maybe they don’t matter for your use case, but they’re good for mine.
For me, Gemini has been hit or miss and somehow less useful than Assistant was 2+ years ago.
I have Gemini Pro for free for a year because I bought a Pixel phone, it answers very fast, so I like it. Let's see how I'll feel about shelling out real money when the subscription ends. But on the phone, I still use Assistant (and just have a shortcut to launch the webpage in my browser), because the phone was forcing Gemini, but after 5 minutes of usage I found it was slower for my usages (usually I just tell it to set an alarm and add a reminder/calendar event), and when I asked about my tasks, Gemini would get the task listing from Google Tasks, and keep it in its history... that'll pollute my chat history!
I've had a similar deal. "Free" means included, and we are the beta testers!
In the last month, Gemini successfully persisted Google notes and calendar events. It also malfunctioned by adding these to chat context...(and not persisting to Google Calendar or Keep.)
Same commands. Different outcomes. It's unusable.
It's just a MEMS mic, a battery, and an ESP32, very simple but it works amazingly well. I wrote a companion Android app for it and it works extremely reliably!
Ai Agent as it has been for months, plus skills, plus a cron job to prompt it to do things every 20 minutes or 2 hours or however often you want.