Chapter 278: Virtual Assistant
"Astrid, I understand you’ve been working with Rina on the designs for the fabricators we need. Can you share your progress and any issues that remain unsolved?" asked Jack.
"Yes, Jack," said Astrid fervently, with a sparkle in her eyes. "We’ve finalized the design of the display fabricator and have sourced manufacturing of all the non-critical components."
Rina nodded in agreement.
Astrid continued, "The chip fabricator design is mostly complete, but we are still tweaking it to deal with some potential reliability issues. We also have the bulk of the non-critical components sourced for manufacturing."
"That’s great, you two. Will there be any problems installing the fabricators in your existing facilities?" asked Jack.
"No," said Astrid, "I’ve already created a plan for installing all the new fabricators and also started working on some training material for the operators."
"What about the nano-cell battery fabricator?" he asked.
"Since we won’t be using the nano-cell aluminum batteries in the first-gen headsets, we’ve been prioritizing the other two fabricators. I have buildings set aside that we can use for the fabrication of those batteries, and we have a preliminary design for the fabricator, but we haven’t finalized the design yet."
"Great. Those nano-cell batteries are going to be in huge demand once we start selling them. They have ten times the storage capacity of even the best lithium batteries and are much safer. So we need to plan ahead for demand well beyond just our gen two VR headset."
"Understood," said Astrid. Rina nodded in agreement.
"What about the gloves?" he asked.
"I don’t have any experience with manufacturing something like that," said Astrid.
"I think I have a fabricator design that can make the gloves," said Rina. "It works in simulations, but there’s a risk that real-world conditions will cause problems I didn’t account for."
"Okay, understood," said Jack. "We’ll just deal with any issues as we encounter them."
Then, turning to Phineas, he asked, "What about headset assembly, Phineas? Will there be any problems?"
"No, Jack. Because all the functionality is condensed into just five chips, the assembly complexity has been reduced. Our assembly line is largely automated, and I believe it can handle the new design."
"We can’t retool your assembly line until after the stock buyback and the company is private again. But we can test out your assembly line in a simulation. Get me a list of the people we absolutely need for that work, and I’ll templatize them."
"Oh! That’s right," said Phineas. "I know you told me you can do that, but I’m still having difficulty wrapping my head around just how far you can go with it. I’ll get that list to you."
"It’s alright," said Jack. "Even I am still trying to get used to all that I can do with it."
He turned to Heidy and Cindy. "Ladies, what’s the progress on Radius 10K?"
"We have all the executives and most of the technical staff hired," said Heidy. "Your ’interview’ ability has made it so much easier to find trustworthy people. It’s amazing how absolutely convincing some of these executive candidates sounded, and yet they were completely full of shit!"
Jack simply did not have the time to summon and sit in on all the interviews they needed to do to fill out the roles in Radius 10K. So instead, they would give him a list of candidates, then he’d templatize all of them, and give Heidy and Cindy permission to summon each one only once.
He did the same for Phineas, Lars and Astrid Jensen, and Helga from Castle Group.
"Same for the technical candidates," said Cindy.
"We’ve leased a building for our corporate headquarters and are working on furnishing offices and establishing IT infrastructure. We are currently on track to go live for phase one in one month," said Heidy.
Cindy nudged Heidy with her elbow.
"And sir?" said Heidy. "May I offer a suggestion?"
"Sure," said Jack.
"Have you considered adding an AI assistant feature to the VR workspace you plan to offer with your VR headsets?"
"How would that be different than just typing in a chat window?" he asked.
"I was thinking about the idea of a virtual assistant. One that the owner could talk to and customize."
Madison coughed.
When he turned to look at her, he saw that she was blushing.
"Madison? Anything you want to add?" he asked.
"Um, I maybe sort of already did what Heidy suggested?"
"Okay, then why are you blushing?"
"Do I have to say?" she asked. He could sense that she was embarrassed by whatever it was she was hiding.
Not wanting to force her into saying something private in a meeting with non-harem members present, but wanting to know why she was blushing, he dove into her mind.
He didn’t need to dig, and what he found made him chuckle. What she had done was very Madison-like. She’d created a virtual AI assistant, and made it look and sound just like him.
As he pulled back out of Madison’s mind, he noticed Rina giving Madison a knowing look.
Despite the embarrassing aspect of what she had done, he also saw that the virtual AI assistant she had created was immensely helpful to her and had drastically increased her productivity.
"Right, we can discuss some aspects of that later, in private, Madison," he said, trying not to laugh. "Can you generalize what you have, make the appearance and personality customizable?"
"Maybe?" she said. "But it takes up an entire giga-cube, so it’s not something we could sell to customers. I might be able to make something based on our first-gen proprietary models."
"How long would that take?" he asked. "And would it still be useful to users?"
"Um, I could maybe have something in a week or two," she sounded uncertain. "And yes, it would still be useful."
"Okay. If you can, create something that makes use of the first-gen proprietary model service Radius will be making available. Work with Heidy and her team to hand over the code so you don’t have to maintain it yourself."
"Okay, sure. I can do that," she said.
Turning back to Heidy, he said, "Great suggestion, Heidy. Don’t hold back if you have any more ideas. Now, what about phase two? Where are we on datacenters?"