The tech seems neat and all but please stop multitasking while driving, encouraging others to multitask while driving, and building products specifically designed to encourage multitasking while driving.
If you want to work while you're in transit: take public transit.
I'm contributing to a similar open source coding tool [1] and I see the same skewed reaction: voice control of "whatever" while driving gets 5-10x the clicks of any other demo.
There's a logical reason so many people think of voice control while driving. It's not because they're reckless.
It reflects the hierarchy of needs. People with long commutes (often younger, lower-paid engineers living further out) spend 2+ hours driving daily.
This is their biggest time sink, so of course they think about making it productive. When you're living far out for cheap housing and hear "coding while driving", its easy to think: finally, a way to get ahead without choosing between career growth and seeing my family.
Again, I think its just an off-the-cuff reaction, not actually what people will do. Just like people try your app and tell you its amazing but then never pay. Doing stuff while driving just sounds nice until you know... you think about it for 3 seconds and yeah, its bad idea.
To me the point of voice control is walking. I'm thinking of Einstein, Darwin, Thoreau. They believed that physical activity helped stimulate his mind and spark creative thought.
You walk, you think, and occasionally you say something.
But in practice people have been quick to jump to conclusions that surprise me. Such as "the point is to try to kill people".
So I'm merely working backwards to figure out why people want to jump in a car first thing.
And the charitable explanation is the people are just not thinking to carefully and are just excited by seeing a computer respond to voice with a low enough error rate.
But the blue founders here don't fall into the first category, and they made a 2 minute ad advertising their product that doesn't fall into the second category either. Charity only stretches so far.
I'm not a startup investor, but I'm quite serious when I say that ad would give me serious doubts about doing business with this founder for purely practical reasons (on top of other ethical ones). That doesn't mean the product is bad, but a business is more than a product.
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HN definitely does have a dog piling problem where one issue is picked out by the community and discussed ad nauseam to exclusion of all else. To be honest between the magnitude of this issue and the fairly significant discussion downthread about other topics I'm not particularly feeling that it is a problem in this thread though.