After reading the AI’s summary of an embargoed PR pitch, Ulanoff had it draft a reply. The first draft overpromised a meeting, so he had it strip the meeting references to just agreeing to the embargo and getting images and details.
Scanned a storybook with his phone and had the AI OCR it and compare it against the list of words and sound patterns his kid knows, flagging the irregular words and new sounds to cover before reading.
Given access to the user's XP Tickets account, the AI locked in two orchestra seats for a concert that night at $117, and is negotiating with a season ticket holder over Warriors vs Mavericks tickets for his brother's birthday.
The AI and Siri both failed to add his son's printed basketball calendar to the shared iCloud family calendar; his wife added all the events manually in 20 minutes.
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School news for his two kids comes through six Facebook groups as well as email. The AI watches all of them, asks him which events he wants to track, spots clashes like a field trip on the same day as a dentist appointment, and keeps his calendar updated, and it also pulls the Scouts dates together and, before a camping weekend at two different spots, told him the weather at each one and what the boys should pack to stay warm.
With three kids at three different schools, Kranda gets a ParentSquare digest for each. Every weekday at 8:53am the AI opens every digest, reads the full text, and sends him only what matters for his kids; on days when nothing is important, he hears nothing at all.
He filmed his kid birthday on a camera and forgot about the indoor fluorescent light, so every video had horrible horizontal flickering. He tried ffmpeg fixes himself and they did a poor job. The good result was in the $295 studio version of DaVinci Resolve. Instead he asked the AI to write a small terminal app that does the fix, and it did it in a single prompt.
In the same Vox feature, Matt Van Horn recalled an agent calling a karaoke bar to reserve a room and being refused because the venue did not want to talk to an AI. He completed the reservation through Fo, a service that adds human help.
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He has the AI logged into the Canvas parent app. It tracks each class and lists any missing assignments. He told it to ignore work missing for less than 3 days, so he does not get noise about things that are not due yet. The first version was all text, so he asked the AI to build a nicer dashboard, and it did. He says it is far better than using the Canvas app himself.