Ask HN: Does anyone use "AI" features in consumer products?

3 andy99 5 7/7/2025, 8:37:24 PM

Chat assistants like GPT, code assistants, all seem to have good PMF and are broadly used. G-suite otoh has been nagging me to death to try some AI things that I don't want, I assume MS Office is the same, we've all seen "Summarize with AI" type buttons everywhere. My guess is that PMs really want people to use these and nobody wants them or they wouldn't be pushed so hard. But has anyone actually used them for anything? Are there any actually good AI features?

Comments (5)

pvg · 13h ago

Megathread the other day https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44478279, among many.

timbaboon · 13h ago

I was included in Strava’s beta testing for their AI offering (Athlete Intelligence). It was useful in no way at all, and the prod version out now is no better. Disabled that.

My bank also started offering a chatbot through WhatsApp to let you query transactions etc, but it hallucinated stuff so I’ve stopped that too.

jeffbee · 13h ago

I love the Strava one because it just riffs on whatever you put on the activity title. "Solid murder spree, well above your weekly average pace".

JohnFen · 13h ago

I don't. I've played with them a bit, but haven't found them to be useful enough to continue with. Now, I'm basically jaded and take the overt presence of "AI" in a thing as a sign that the thing itself is substandard.

al_borland · 13h ago

I use the summarization all the time. There are many times I want more information than the headline, but I’m not looking to spend 20-40 minutes reading a whole article to get a little more context or answer a specific question I may have.

Safari’s reader mode has a summary option I use. If I want something a little more verbose, I go to Kagi’s summary tool. Kagi also has an option to let me ask questions about the article. I find all these things pretty valuable.

I’ve also used the option in YouTube to ask questions about a video. Sometimes it sucks, as it doesn’t seem to actually watch/understand the video… but there are times it has saved me 40 minutes my answering the question posed in the title of the video that I wanted the answer to. Other times it gives me the timestamp to the point in the video that matters. It still feels very beta, but has some promise, epically with all these long rambling videos people make these days.

I’ve occasionally use Apple’s proofreading feature as well. It worked decently well.

If we are speaking more broadly, the ML/AI behind looking up subjects in the Photos app is very useful. I also see a lot of people using it to pull subjects out of pictures. It’s not generative AI, but it’s used by a lot of consumers everyday. The same can be said for even more invisible forms, like the photo processing on most smartphones.

My dad is really into bird photography in his retirement, and his camera can recognize a bird and focus on its eye. I assume that’s using some kind of AI, <insert xkcd 1425 here>.