#39: Making Siri more useful

We're here seeing consumer apps that you guys are trying to make Siri useful. First of all, who are you guys?

My name is Ryan Holmes. I'm the CEO and founder of Jet Buy and we have an app where you buy things on Siri.

Yeah.

And this is my colleague Jason. He's helping us out with marketing.

And welcome to my house. I wanted to do it at the house because I'm going to be using your app on this couch. Right. To do all sorts of things. Siri, I mean, the first Siri, when they launched it in my house way back in 2009 now or something like that, really let you buy a lot of things like get movie tickets and stuff like that. And now it doesn't. And there's a whole bunch of political reasons it doesn't. But now along comes you and I'm like, oh, I know a lot of people still use Siri, use Apple Intelligence or whatever they call it now. Right. And. And we want to do more with it. Can't do much with it.

I think the best thing to do is just show everyone how it works. Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay. So at any moment, this is the beauty is that your phone can be locked and this is really engineering wise, this is important.

Yeah.

So any moment you can say, hey, sir, Jet Buy lunch, your order for.

Lunch has been placed.

So that just sent off an order from for Papa John's Pizza, and that's going to be delivered here on the show live.

Oh.

So I just got a text.

Awesome.

And this is my little text. It's telling me that the order has been placed and confirmed.

Now how did you set that up to do Papa John's? Right.

Well, usually it's sent to my house for my pizza, but we're doing this interview today, so I sent it to your house.

But you do pizza every day. Why don't you show me the app and how you set that up and all that. And so it's a way to hook in transactions into Siri in a new way. Jetpy.

Yeah, in a way, it's the fastest way to buy anything ever made.

So show me Jet Buy.

So this is our app. So if you go here on the App Store and you type in Jet Buy, we are already the first person at the top.

Yep.

And so you click here, you can download this, update it, etc.

Okay.

Here'S our version of the app. So here's all your command words. You have Starbucks favorite one. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, pizza, salad, sushi, healthy coffee.

Now, how much of these are default and how much do you customize this?

So I customize every single one of these.

Okay.

So I have my Starbucks, I have my favorite. I have a breakfast, I have a lunch, I have dinner, and I have coffee over at Koopa Cafe in Palo Alto.

Yeah, yeah, that's a good place.

And so.

And how do you make one of these? How do you add a new one?

Okay, so you just. So for pizza you would go here and you would go, you would type in Papa John's or your favorite pizza.

Yeah, there's a round table or whatever. Yeah.

And so then all the Papa John's would show up, as you can see. So right now we have millions of stores fully functional in the entire United States and the entire country of Canada. Almost billions of items.

So if you count, what's magic about you is you add on transactions this way onto your Siri button. Right. So you can just say, hey, get me pizza. And now it saves you a little bit of time every time you order pizza, right?

Yeah, it's this idea because I get.

Pizza from the same place every, every Wednesday. Right. My son loves pepper.

Civilized people, like we can spend $20 here and there on, on things quick and easy. But if, if you go to order on DoorDash, it's 20 pages.

Yeah.

And we love doordash. We work with doordash and a lot of our stores come from DoorDash. But 20 pages is a lot of pages. Yeah, it's like when you go to a restaurant and you have like a 20 page menu and you're sitting here reading like a novel and you just want the same thing you already ordered. Yeah. And so this just keeps it really simple. You have your favorite items and you just flash order them. And so, and this can happen at any moment. Like right now, I, I can say that command and I can order it right at any second. Like if you're driving, you're on the way home and you're thinking, well, I have an interview in an hour, I'd like to have food here in 20 minutes. You can say it on the way home. Food can be there when you're ready, when you're home, and then you can have your interview right on time. It makes your life smoother and it's not exists. Like if you think about it, we're a technologist. I mean, you're an extreme futurist. You see the future, predict the future. I mean we're like, we're Elon's building like a 50.

You must listen to me. I have colored lights. Yes.

You have colored lights, but it's, it's crazy that it's not possible.

Yeah.

To order something on your phone.

Yeah.

On your iPhone. It's impossible currently.

Yeah.

And so it's just this idea that it should be possible and it should be easy.

Yeah.

And so we're sort of pioneering to make this happen for everyone. Yeah.

How are you going to make money off this?

You know, because if I get 99amonth, it's a small subscription, so five bucks.

So it's like a latte. It's less than a latte at a couple cafe sometimes, right?

Yeah.

That could be six bucks. That's how I figure in prices. How many lattes does this cost me?

And we're adding in deals. So if you save $5 on one of your orders, it makes sense to have it. Yeah, it's economically.

So you're building a buying club out of this.

Responsible.

Are you going to build. If you get 100,000 people using this.

Leverage, the buying power, get some discounts.

From Starbucks if you get 100,000. Right. You get enough users, you got buying power and now you can. Now you can get some discounts for things or buy two of these, get a third party free.

The Jet Club.

Yeah, I like that.

That's good.

What are you learning by doing this? Kind of hooking into Siri, you know, because Siri is a pain in the ass to deal with.

So we have a lot of live chats going with all of our like first batch of hundred users. So I'm talking to people every single day. Some of our requests we're getting is pet food is a really big one. So yeah, a lot of people, you.

Wake up and you realize your pet food's out. You want to just want to say, hey sir, you get me more pet food.

And it's, it's a classic problem where if you have it on recurring, you get this buildup of pet food in your house and like how many 50 pound bags of PET food you want to store, you know, in the closet. But it's also something that you don't want to take 30 minutes to go get and you can't miss a day. Like you don't want to starve your pet for a day. That's not an option. So you like have to go to the pet store. So. So it saves you that, that like I call it recurring. Non recurring.

Yeah.

So it's these items that you buy on a recurring basis, but you don't necessarily want them on the Amazon recurring subscription. And so it Just makes it easy. And you flash order it in a single second. And even your family, if they know the command, they can do it. If they notice. If they notice.

It's. Now you just brought up something. I have a blueair air cleaner over there that needs some filters. And I stopped. I stopped doing recurring because they send me two filters every few months and the filters wouldn't be dirty.

That's a good one.

So I started ending up with a bunch of 60 filters in my garage. And I was like, oh, this is stupid doing recurring on this. I'll just buy them when I need them. Do. Does that company need to be in the service already? Blue Air.

We have to look. I don't. There's billions of items, so I don't even know the extent. Where do you get your Blue Air filter? Yeah, online@blueairfilter.com or Blueair. Is there a box store that has it?

Like, we'd have to do this offline when I'm not.

But we might have it. I don't know.

You might have it, so. So you have to try. Yeah, but for things like Starbucks coffee or pizza or.

That's a good one.

That's a great thing that comes to your house. Toilet paper. Well, I always pick that up at Costco. You know, we have.

Don't miss.

We're. We're hoard. Yeah, we're hoarders here. We got plenty of toilet paper. Won't get you again, but that's a good example. Do you have Costco in there?

We do.

Okay, so I can order things from Costco.

There's an Apple store at Costco, which is interesting. You can jet by iPhones.

Oh, wow. Okay.

Yeah. Get your vision pro.

What else are you learning about this world? You know, because you're trying to hook into this world of people who want to do things with their voice on their phone. Right? Yeah. That's interesting to me. What are you learning about this world of building software for this world and trying to keep the first.

I learned that simple things are not that easy to build. I mean, we met when I was doing my last company, which was a space company, which is highly, you know, much more difficult, but for software, it's still very difficult. A lot of refinement, a lot of customer feedback, more refinement. And being in the food space is interesting. Like, I'm in the food industry now. I didn't expect to be, like a part of the food industry. And there's a lot of considerations and there's trends like being healthy versus being convenient or there's a lot of trends that are, that you're sort of forced to follow.

Yeah.

Sometimes people are trying to lose weight, sometimes they're not. It's kind of interesting.

So, yeah, hooking into the big boys is hard. Right. You know, because Apple controls Siri, right? Yeah.

I mean, we're lucky that we're at a time where this is even possible. Yeah. I mean, if you look at DoorDash as a company, when did DoorDash come out? When were there DoorDash?

Years ago.

Yeah, it was, it's a recent development.

Yeah.

And so ever since COVID they've become like the sort of dominant player. And that ended, I don't know, that was like three, four years ago. So it's only been possible to make what we're making right now because I, because we didn't have national global delivery infrastructure to build on. So it's kind of like the right time. And Apple's opened up Siri. There's something called Siri Kit. There's Apple intelligence, which is making it even more open and accessible and smarter.

I think people just, it's still not smart enough. But, you know, for a lot of reasons. You know, I mean, I, I, here's one. I was in South Carolina and getting a tour or just walk around and somebody at breakfast said, oh, you need to go and see, see the rate. I think she said Rainbow Row or something like that. I, I said painted houses, because that's what it translated into was there's a row of especially painted houses in Charleston, South Carolina. And I asked Siri and it's like, I don't know how to answer that question. How about I ask chat GPT and I hit okay, and it goes over and prompts chat DPT brings me back an answer of, oh, those are in New Orleans and San Francisco. Which is right. If you ask painted houses, that's where the painted houses are, is there's two, two places in San Francisco, New York, in New Orleans, but I was in Charleston, South Carolina. In other words, Apple didn't pass along the location of where the user was contacts because they're trying to keep privacy. Right. Apple's really freaked out about people's privacy and trying to make sure that people don't get freaked out by these new AI things. Right. Because if it knew where you were, it would answer the question properly. In fact, that's what I did. I said, no, I'm in Charleston, South Carolina. Then it sent back the prompt, then it came back with the correct answer. Which is. Oh, those are right around the block from you. Right. Which it was. I was real close to them. I didn't even know where they were. And then Siri brings up a map and shows me how to get there. Right.

Are you using Apple Intelligence more frequently?

I'm trying it. I, I still like talking to ChatGPT. And is it smooth?

Like, can you ask? I heard it's you can, but it's just, you switch to ChatGPT.

It's just stupid because it, because it didn't pass along the location. Right. And so. And all of them are stupid at something. Really brilliant at other things. Right. But Chat GPT at least understands me and can have a conversation with me, which is something that Apple Intelligence doesn't yet do. Doesn't have a chatbot where you can just be talking to it back and forth.

Yeah.

I mean, Chat GBT taught me how to play poker on the way to San Francisco one day just by me talking back, well, what if, how do I cheat at this? How do I do I, how do I play this card? If I, if I see this card? What, what do I do to play this? How do I bet? How do I, you know, asking him a billion questions on the way to San Francisco and was having a conversation with me like you are right now. Right. Siri doesn't do that.

We're looking at this feature for when you don't know what you want to eat.

Yeah.

Like, you know, you want something.

Yeah.

What. What do I want? Yeah, like, you feeling Indian pizza? Do you want to try this new place?

You know, are you into fast food? Are you into.

How healthy are you feeling?

Yeah, you know, I mean, that's, that's why I want these chatbots. And I think they're going to be real popular for that kind of use case because they're really good at rejiggering the answer based on your feedback.

Yeah.

Right. If you teach it a little bit more like, I'm not real hungry, I'm not into a big meal. Right. It'll change the results that it comes back with the, you know, it'll reprompt and come back with a better answer for it. And AI LLMs, large language models that run chat GPT or perplexity or Google Gemini or Quad or Grok Radon X. They're very flexible and they're really good at rejiggering themselves. Right. So it makes sense that you would try to hook into the LLM and add some more features to your thing. Right?

Yeah. I mean, this is It's a simple problem, but it's a simple problem for billions of people. Yeah, right. And if you. I was just having this the other day where you don't know what you want to eat. I mean, this is a classic problem. And, and it would be nice to get to the point.

I mean, if you're in Las Vegas, you know, there's a thousand place to eat, right? And what do you feel like? And particularly if you have four people all trying to figure out where to go to eat, it's a problem, right? It's.

It's hard to deploy the multi agent. Everyone start chatting.

I ask Siri, please show me a path through Las Vegas for maximum dopamine. It's a great, it's a great prop.

Are you allowed to tell the first stop?

No, no, actually, here's one. The first list it gives you is family friendly. It takes you to like, you know, oh, you should go to the Sphere in Vegas or you should go to this nightclub or, you know, dance or whatever. Then you say, oh, don't tell me about the family friendly ones. Tell me about the adult ones. It knows all those too. But you have to, you have to prompt for that, right? You have to sort of say, hey, give me the adult ones.

Unlock the filter.

Yeah, you got to unlock the adult ones because the first default answer, unless you ask for adults websites, you know, it gives you back family friendly ones. Right?

Yeah, yeah.

It's trying to keep the customers from getting freaked out.

What's, what's crazy is it's not pot. Like it's not possible. If you're the king of Saudi Arabia, you cannot order something through your phone. Yeah, you have to order something. It's impossible.

You have to order somebody.

It's literally not possible.

And, or you have to get a dash door.

Their cars are driving them. Scared ourselves. Yeah, you can't order a pizza on Siri. Like, it's wild.

All right, here's one. Can you get weed on your, on your app?

We should have.

Yeah, because there's three. There's three places that deliver weed to this neighborhood. I'm not going to tell you why.

I know that. You have to use your weed id. Where are we at with this?

Okay, they check it at the car when they bring it.

Is it Weed maps?

Weed Maps is a map that shows you all the places.

But what's the best delivery one?

I don't know. I haven't, I haven't bought it.

One of your.

I know that there's one called Bento here. I I forget you know, which are the best for delivery because generally I just go.

And we do have wine. Wine and beer.

Oh, okay. Yeah, like from Bevino or something like that.

All kinds of stores. Safeway 711 is interesting because they're 247 and you never know, you know, if it's a late party, 1:00am, 3:00am if you want like a, a six pack.

Or even if you need some aspirin because you got home from the party, you're over.

Yeah, the health.

Yeah, that's what good 711 is good for. You know, I need some aspirin. Oh, that's open at 3 in the morning. Oh, 7:11. Yeah.

Yes. You could get both. You could get the aspirin and a six pack.

Keep it going, keep it rolling. Anyways, where do we learn more about.

This so you can download it on the app store? Jet Buy comes up as the number one. And this is really kind of a journey of experimenting with what should exist. And this is really about pioneering something that should exist. And even with OpenAI as advanced and as sophisticated as this, you cannot buy something on your iPhone. It's impossible. And so hopefully things like Operator will get to the phone. But at the current range, it's really.

Good at moving you Buy. By the way, I bought my tires on OpenAI on operator. No know, just talking to chat GPT.

To find the right thing. Yeah.

I have a Tesla with 20 inch wheels. I need some tires. I like performance tires. Right. You just tell it, just start talking to it about what you want and it comes back with a really good list. But it doesn't let you transact. To transact, you have to click on a link, go over to a car shop and then transact over there.

Transaction is key.

Yeah, it's key. That's going to get all filled in I think over the next year eventually.

Right.

But I liked yours because you hook in Siri and Siri's in a lot of people's hands. Right? Yeah.

We're building from something real, something that works now for billions of people.

Yeah. That's why I wanted to meet with you. So thank you very much.

Yeah, thanks for having us.

Awesome.

Pleasure to hear.