Ask HN: Will "indirect phones" replace today's phones?

1 amichail 9 6/26/2025, 1:54:36 PM

With an indirect phone, you’d never speak directly to anyone.

Instead, you’d talk to an AI that serves as your communicator.

When someone calls, the AI answers and later relays a summary of the message to you. You can ask the AI for more details about what the caller said.

If you want to reply, you do so via the AI.

For example: “Tell Joe that we can have a business meeting on Tuesday.”

Do you think such indirect phones would become popular?

Comments (9)

moritzwarhier · 15m ago

Wasn't this the promise of Google "Duplex"? (edit: not Duo).

A tech demo from 2018.

But what's the point of this over text messages from the start?

TTS is a thing, and if you can't organize your speech properly, you could of course use an AI agent like ChatGPT to summarize your message while it's turned into text, or even into any arbitrary structured format.

You can even check that the output matches what you meant before submitting!

marssaxman · 4h ago

A friend of mine already does something much like this: she communicates by talking to her phone, which transcribes her messages and sends them as text. She practically never has a live phone conversation, nor writes any messages herself. I'm sure she would take to a system like you describe quite naturally, describing what she wants to say instead of strictly dictating it.

For me, I so rarely make or receive voice phone calls that I would likely not bother setting up such a service even if it were given to me for free; nor do I ever use voice interfaces, if I can help it. I much prefer to write.

JohnFen · 2h ago

But that's still direct communication. It's not involving an intermediary. Perhaps I misunderstood the question. I took it as meaning the elimination of all direct communication, not just voice.

marssaxman · 1h ago

Either I don't understand what you mean by direct communication, or we have different impressions of what the "indirect phone" proposal meant. What I heard didn't sound so different from the way I already use my phone - I almost exclusively send and receive messages, asynchronously, rather than having synchronous voice conversations. I thus took the proposal to be about automated ways of generating and digesting these messages. What were you envisioning?

JohnFen · 52m ago

What I mean by "direct communication" is that my words go directly to who I'm talking with and their words go directly to me. I'm interpreting "indirect communication" as used in the OP to mean that I tell an intermediary (an LLM in this case) what I want to say, and the intermediary says it for me (and vice versa).

I wasn't thinking that the medium used (voice, text, whatever) was an important part of the direct/indirect distinction.

JohnFen · 8h ago

If someone doesn't want to talk to me, I'd much prefer they just don't talk to me rather than employ an intermediary.

amichail · 8h ago

I think direct communication will be considered rude in the future.

JohnFen · 8h ago

Perhaps, perhaps not.

If so, that will be a shame for me as it would reduce the amount of communication I have, and so increase isolation. Indirect communication is reduced communication.

reify · 6h ago

I am just imagining how it would work out in an argument.

between a husband and wife say.

its bad enough when you have done something wrong to upset your better half,

How would they scream and shout at you down the phone if the message went through a chatbot.

How would a chatbot express and convey your emotions at that time. Highy unlikely a chatbot would get that right.

hey chatbot, shout this at my husband. make sure you are really angry with him.

chatbot summarised reply: in a balanced chatbot voice. your wife is really angry with your for cheating on her. you naughty bad bad husband.

might work for some power hungry, domineering manager, demanding action from an employee.

but the general public, no way.

I like people and like the sound of their voices. I can tell what sort of mood people are in when I call them.

humans need to express all their emotions, thats what humans do.

might be handy if you were arrested by the police,

Dear copper, please refer your questions via my chatbot.

your under arrest son.