Around here (I live in Wisconsin) it’s quite common in group rides, but often it’s Shokz or just one earbud in on the right side.
In fact I can’t recall the last time I saw some legitimately blocking both ears.
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Ha, reminds me of Midsouth, I showed up with Shokz, barely got to the start on time, started going, pressed play, nothing… I had left my phone on the hood of my car. I was so bummed as I spent plenty of time solo during the race. Thankfully my phone didn’t disappear when I got back…
I don’t know anyone who rides with headphones. It’s not even a safety thing, but a social thing. Especially in club rides, I think it would be considered pretty impolite. People want to chat, you just wouldn’t put your headphones on and listen to music instead.
I think it’s also a generational/age thing.
who knows, but I’ll say this, bike computers are getting closer and closer to mobile phones (Karoo 3 is basically a mobile phone). So whatever window of opportunity you have is shrinking.
I listen to music all-the-time, probably the only (or one of maybe 2?) people on the forum that give theme songs to bike rides I post on the forum. With links to YouTube for your listening pleasure. Like this recent one:
St Vincent’s Broken Man is on high repeat around here, give it a listen! (sorry for the digression)
But on the bike I want to unplug and be in the zone without distractions.
This morning I had an 8am dentist appointment, the office is right around the corner from the high school. While slow rolling around 15-20mph, some teenager pulled in front of my car and she was wearing AirPods. Completely oblivious that I was on the road, taking the lane. About 10 seconds later she turns around and literally freaked out so much she nearly fell off her cruiser.
This is an entirely different direction than head units. The idea is to use a local chatGPT-like model to determine your intent from your statement and map it to the correct function.
This allows for a practically infinite “screen” if you will.
People are used to being restricted to only the options on the screen and in many cases are handling terrain and situations where it may be hard to flip between screens, think icy conditions and wearing gloves, or mountain biking.
This tool would additionally keep people looking at the road and not at a tiny screen, and may be especially helpful for those with vision impairments.
So, to the point of making people less aware of their surroundings, this is voiced turn by turn directions along with the ability ask practically any question about your route or current activity without even having to look down.
I was with a cyclist the other day who was taking his phone out of his pocket, opening up Apple maps, and try to get directed to a particular bike shop, and then quickly stuffing it away again, repeating this process whenever we were clearly getting off course.
Frankly, this actually doesn’t have to do with music at all even though many would assume you would be playing music at the same time, most of the time, I wouldn’t.
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No it’s not. If you had a Karoo style mobile phone as bike computer, with similar neural processing power as your mobile phone, there is no difference. Not trying to diminish your idea, just saying this is a natural evolution of the bike computer as it inherits mobile phone processing power and ability to do all the things.
On a ride, I’ve lifted my wrist and asked my Apple Watch “hey Siri, I want to ride my bike to the nearest Starbucks” and it gave me a list and biking route with ETA on a bike (or I could override for car or walking). If my iPhone was on handlebars the route comes up on the phone as well.
I don’t have a Karoo, but I’ve mounted my iPhone on my handlebars many times. Garmin already has a POI database, I never use it, but it’s there on my 840. And I don’t have a Wahoo, but if it isn’t supported its not far off.
About the same number of people I ride with on Wed and Sat group rides have their phone mounted on handlebars, than wear headphones. Wide range of ages - 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s.
Again not trying to discourage you, sounds like a fun coding project I’d like to do myself! Just pointing out obvious next steps in the mobile world.
I think you’re missing what makes this special, it works offline, and is designed for cycling.
Imagine saying “hey Siri, what’s the elevation gain and average gradient for the biggest climb on the route?” and it tells you.
Google assistant, Siri, ChatGPT, are all useless in the middle of a gravel race, or, really, anywhere mildly remote.
Additionally, I know all about the latest head units, I own many of them and have even written connect IQ apps.
They’re ridiculously limited in terms of processing power because they typically show a screen at all times to deliver their information and need to last as long as possible.
Unless Hammerhead wanted to create a 100% Android compatible version with tflite support that can handle AI like DeepSpeech, Bert, etc. by using even a moderately recent, power-hungry snapdragon, there’s no chance.
So, in reality, there is currently no tool remotely like this. It has far more versatility than head units because it’s restricted to human speech, not screens and buttons. It doesn’t need the internet for its core functionality, and it knows about both your ride and your route.
Heck, I could even integrate it into Garmin using ConnectIQ, so you could state “Show the elevation page”, or “show average power”, and it does.
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Does nothing for me, I reviewed the route before the ride.
I’m not your target customer.
I’ve been in the embedded electronics world since the 1980s, wrote some machine learning stuff in the early 90s, so yes, I get it. Don’t care that “nothing like it right now” - my point is that on iPhone with RideWithGPS and a few other hacks, the proof of concept limitation is Apple opening up Siri actions.
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Mark me down as someone who misunderstood and thought you were going to use the phone to power the data. How are you going to get answers to your questions if the phone is offline?
come on, you were in IT, right? Not hard at all.
more explicitly, @Pbase your Garmin (think you have a 1040?) can answer a lot of those questions with just some taps. And your Garmin is offline.
In the interm, until I feel like connecting it to connectIQ, I will use the phone to record the data, as it can connect to BLE devices like powermeters just fine.
The core functionality of following a route, getting turn by turn directions, being able to talk to it, and getting responses about your route/activity is all offline.
Additional functionality like “take me to the nearest gas station” will likely require internet (as I can make it call my routing service for my other app) but in reality, I can simply download a square of road network data to your device in a 50mi box that includes your route and do that navigation on the fly.
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Yeah, you’re right. In my mind, I’ve extrapolated way beyond asking questions about the route, and turned it into a full on chatGPT/ask Siri, which is not what he proposed. My bad.
Garmin’s “Navigate back to start” likes to turn a 20 mi ride into a 54 mi ride in my experience… I could offer “navigate the flattest way back to start”, “navigate the most scenic way back to start”, “generate a 30 mi route from my current location”.
I’ve already built all of that for my route creation site so I can easily port it over.
Well, it does use a NLP AI, BERT, but only to map the intent of your question to the right function, not perform any reasoning beyond that, as speed and accuracy are a priority. So, if you ask, “what’s my max heart rate”, it simply maps that intent to max_heart_rate()
While I understand your enthusiasm and passion, and I’m excited reading about the technology, around here we ride outside all year. On standard routes because those are the safe roads. That all sounds great as website copy. But I just don’t see much use for it. And when you are out of cell coverage, it’s because you are in the mountains and there only a few roads.
And back on the climbs, here is a screenshot I took a year ago on my 840:
its a couple swipes away.
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Hey, I got the 1040 solar, and I’ve been developing this!
First, works great until it’s raining (pesky touch screens).
Second, I built a physics simulator that can figure out where you will be when on a course (taking into account bike type, single track/paved/unpaved/handling ability, etc.) pre-process the route and give you better weather information anywhere on the route, calculated whenever you have even the slightest internet. So you can ask questions like “at what mile is this headwind going to be over?” or, have it recognize the words “Gel” and “water”, and simply state this every time you have one and ask, “how many carbs have I consumed so far”?
Also, I hate it when climb pro comes up and obscures the screen, it’d be nice to get an audio notification instead, additionally, I believe my climb extraction algorithm is better than Garmin’s.
The fact of the matter is, your comparing a very expensive head unit that’s limited by screens/buttons, that you need to take your hands off the handlebar to manipulate, which takes your eyes off the road to figure out details with a completely free alternative that has nearly limitless functions and heck, it’s not like you’d cycle without your phone? Why not make it work for you while it’s on your back?
Have you tested the microphones of popular bluetooth headphones? I can imagine the phone having trouble to understand what is said with all the wind noise.
I’m currently working on implementing state-of-the-art AI wind noise-specific denoisers, specifically, CleanUNet 2 if I can manage it.
Additionally, I’m further training the deepspeech model for voice to text to include training with windy audio, and it has a scorer to try to match to a variety of cycling-specific phrases.
So, WIP, already far better than other voice to text in wind.
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Nice job selling, but none of that interests me. Clearly I’m not your customer.
Throwing FUD at taking one hand off to swipe is laughable because I do that for other reasons like to shake off tension.
Headwind is over when its over (look at my forum name), and one thing I’ve learned on all day adventure rides in NorCal is that the forecasts are never correct (except for the heat during the summer). Try predicting wind in all the canyons out here, no cell coverage, no houses, no weather stations, unpredictable air flow, etc, etc.
I’m sure you’ll find users.
I appreciate your critical take! Frankly, I’m not looking to “Sell” it either, it’s really the thought of, is it worth the time and effort to make a production app? and remake it for IOS? I’d probably have to make a landing page for it too.
The cool thing about software is, unless it really takes some server space or processing, it costs practically nothing to share something I made, but if it’s not something people are interested in, I’ll just keep it as my fun, secret weapon, for gravel races.
I know it’s a crazy thought these days to just make fun free tools, seeing Strava raise prices with every “ground breaking feature”, I frankly, get quite a lot of satisfaction adding things to my sites that everyone else charges for.
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