yes, it's like using a company travel agent. doesn't save you any time really, once you have specified all your constraints.

Summoning Ubers arguably is a great use case because at airports you're probably busy moving to the pickup point and dealing with spotty signal on the way there. Comparing multiple services by hand in that environment is kind of a pain in the ass. It would be great to instead use an agent that is probably talking to their APIs to do this faster, and I can focus on other things at that moment like texting whoever I'm seeing.

It takes 30 seconds to check both uber and lyft. 45 seconds adding waymo to the mix. You want to pay for a service to save you 45 seconds. And thats the best case. Worst case it screws up an address and that isn’t unlikely either.

It does not in fact take 30 seconds to check uber alone even when you have good signal - and correctly copy the address every time without deleting it by accident, not having to restart the app because it times out and won't let you back to the search bar, etc.

The whole point of agents for this kind of stuff is to not have to think about it so you can focus on something more important than a mobile app failing to compute its core function alongside the other nonsense it's doing. And no it doesn't screw up the address either, this isn't 2021 anymore.

So in this low cell signal situation the gigantic bloated ai solution will book a rideshare for you? When the first party apps can’t even connect to their servers?

most airports in the US have good cell service. you book the uber as the plane parks. you meet your uber driver at the rideshare pickup area. i fly a lot; this is what most people do

Which is the stupidest fucking thing ever. There should just be a line of cars waiting to pick you up and you get in line and that car drives you to your destination. Aka a taxi stand, just with technology. Get in the car, the driver scans a QR code on your phone that was generated by you, telling the driver where to go. The reason we can't just do that is because taxi laws are stupid and Ubers are not a taxi so we're forced to play that stupid game because money and power, so we can't fix things. Arg.

taxi lobby f*ed up a golden opportunity there

That is exactly how it works at airports in India

> There should just be a line of cars waiting to pick you up and you get in line and that car ...

This one is not law. That absolutely exists ... but airports demand money for taxis to join that line of customers and so these got more expensive and are never the cheap option.

What’s missing from this is also the choice of the rideshare driver. Maybe they don’t want to take you 30 miles to your destination. Maybe your destination is in an area of no business so it’ll cost more for them to get back to a place they’ll find another fare.

The rideshare race to the bottom model of pricing has some bad aspects to it, but choice for the driver before accepting the trip is one positive.

Couldn't agree more. I'm wondering if this will be revisited once Waymos at airports become more commonplace.

If you’re that price conscious, take the bus. Or just get in the line for an actual taxi. The last time I tried to get ride share at the airport the drivers all declined them to drive up the price. I started getting offers for 200, I just went and got a taxi for 50.

So astoundingly marginal. Seriously wondering how many Meta astroturfers are in here with some of these posts.

I think you're just in your own bubble of how people use technology. I hate typing and looking at a screen while in motion. I can absolutely imagine myself using voice mode at home saying "I need a ride to X destination, leaving home within 30 minutes, just me in the car, check Uber Lyft and Waymo and book the cheapest one."

I don't have any kind of agent set up to do that now, but to me that sounds like removed friction even if I use it just a few times a year.

I constantly use the Ask AI thing in Google maps to tell it a complex route involving biking and transit and needing to be at a certain place at a certain time. It hasn't messed up on me yet. I would much rather specify the question in natural language than type anything into a rule based UI. In fact I built a toy app years ago that handled a few of my most common queries with the Maps API and I still never used it because of the friction.

We’ll see.

Siri has been able to book you a ride share since iOS 18 without needing an LLM. Generic speech recognition is fine for what you need.

have you used Siri vs. the new crop of personal ai assistants?

siri is horrific

You may think Siri is horrific, but it can do what the poster is asking for at less cost than an LLM.

Never used Muse or any personal agent for that matter. GTFO.

[delayed]

maybe but this is an AI chatbot inside Uber that will not consider other services. And your own claw will not get an API to be able to compare. Can you imagine the horror on the providers faces if you suggest such idea.