Day 12 - User Interface (n.)⚡️

robots talk pretty well these days (⚡️BetterFriend Project Day 8 - 38)

Jul 15, 2025

noun.

: the interface features through which users interact with the hardware and software of computers and other electronic devices. UI

Quick Recap:

We now have,

Product Requirement Doc (Live Doc) - PRD:

⚡️⚡️ BetterFriend PRD Building Publicly v1 ⚡️⚡️

A New Logo & Branding: that feels like a family-owned diner than an alarm clock

Vision:

“Remind me my friends’ birthdays where I will 100% see it. Always reliable.”

Done by Whatsapp & Telegram chatbots

Building on a chat interface

In 2017 I left Facebook / Instagram to launch my Travel Gear company named KARAK. I built a chatbot on Facebook Messenger using a no-code tool to interact with community of travelers - I built a page called TRAVEL HACKS & TOOLS to over 1,000 community members and the chatbot provided e-book to the community automatically in exchange for collecting emails.

Facebook first launched chatbot feature on Messenger app in 2016. This was big.

But this is only new in the western world...Wechat had it since 2012 in China…

So the idea of chatbot is not new - I’ve built one with no coding experience 8 years ago. But the functionality of a chatbot at that time was limited by it’s ability to understand incoming messages. We had limited buttons that we could give to the users to press and each button pressed goes to a decision tree that triggered simple commands like dominoes.

Learn More → Responding with a text paragraph

Email input + Subscribe → Sending a PDF document

We couldn’t make it do much more than that really.

Then came NLP - Natural Language Processing. This came before the current version of ChatGPT and what we call AI today and improved it quite a bit so that machines can interpret more complex incoming messages to run more complex decision trees / logic.

The coolest ChatGPT moment in 2022 for me was that for the first time the chat can not only fully understand any messages that I was sending, but also it took that message, reasoned with it, and decide what answers to give each time uniquely.

The A → B became ∞ → ∞ (∞ is infinity).

The chatbot went from the stone age where it could only shoot bows and arrows to hunt animals to all of the sudden able to have intelligence and build new tools like guns and cars.

“how smart can this be?”

Well the intelligence is the LLM - Large Language Models. They are getting better every day. For those that aren’t following tech & AI closely, OpenAI / Anthropic / Meta (Facebook) / Grok (X.com) / Gemini (Google) / Bytedance (Tiktok) / Alibaba / DeepSeek / Baidu - The biggest companies in the world are using hundreds of billions of NVIDIA GPUs to make the intelligence better every day.

This is a fun watch by former CTO of OpenAI and the top AI scientist in the world:

But the chat interface?

It will evolve.

Maybe at one point people just expect a full voice interaction. Or video even? what about the futuristic brain to computer interface like Neural Link?

Well I don’t think the Brain UI will come any time soon, but just this year alone, we are seeing 3 contenders for always on voice AI hardware. I’m excited to try it out myself:

Plaud has been around the longest, the most battle tested, and has the best reviews.

Then a company named Rewind did a hard pivot and rebranded to Limitless.AI going from software to hardware. Much more expensive than Plaud at $400.

And we’ve got ourselves a more developer / hacker friendly version called Omi here:

In addition, there’s rumor that OpenAI will launch their own voice AI hardware w/ the legendary Johnny Ive who designed the iPhone:

These are just voice hardware.

In the video realm, we’ve seen Snapchat Spectacles trying to stay relevant.

Google reviving the Google Glass and calling the Android XR

And last but not least, Zuck is making a fashion statement with Oakley’s and Meta’s newest video streaming glasses:

In the context of BetterFriend, I’ve done a ton of research on how I want people to stay in touch with their loved ones. I’ll push some boundaries for how far I can take the chatbot before exploring Mobile App and other channels.

I’m excited to test out Plaud.AI’s voice AI summary and recording to see if it can be paired with storing data into a secure personal database that’s end to end encrypted for BetterFriend database, and also understand where the video data goes that’s recorded by Meta’s AI glasses which is even more sensitive and private.

Ultimately, we need a place to store these things that only we should be able to access. I don’t trust any company today to store any of this data for me or my friends.

More to come on this.

See ya tomorrow!

⚡️BetterFriend Project Day 8 - 38