The new CC, an AI agent built for families

The new CC, an AI agent built for families blog.google

Google Labs is expanding CC to groups, starting with families and households, so they can spend less time on logistics.

52 points•grigy•8 days ago•63 comments•

#families #ai #agent #ai agent #agent built #ai agent built #labs #google

63 comments

dhon_8 days ago

As a parent with kids at three different schools, help keeping track of their schedules would be amazing.

Currently updates from the schools are spread over multiple sources: paper notes, email, sms, "news" and "calendar" in school app (which are not kept in sync), and Facebook. Different schools use different apps.

Additionally the channels are often noisy, with messages about groups my kids don't belong to, and "helpful tips" like how to pack healthy lunchboxes. These notifications come in during the day while I'm working, get dismissed due to the low SNR and then the useful ones often slip through unnoticed.

Definitely an area that is ripe for disruption, but as others here have commented, I don't feel confident about Google being the provider.

pokot08 days ago

My wife and I have been working exactly on this for some time now. We are building a companion for families to help you keep your life, career, physical and mental health in order in the challenging times when you raise a family and are building your career.

We are running a small trial group right now to optimize the experience and see how people and real non-tech families react to this.

We are a tiny startup and our business is not data nor customer addiction. We will simply be charging our customers and put them at the center of our focus. We are honestly trying to understand what can genuinely be helpful to families and make all the innovations that we are seeing available to them.

This is not targeted to the HN crowd; yes, you can hack your assistant with a bunch of Claude/Codex automations and be happy! 100% possible and also fun to do. This is for everyone else that has no time/skills/intention to sit in front of a laptop for this.

I saw the post yesterday but decided to not write right away and wait for the post to slow down as we are supposed to be in a closed trial since each user costs us money right out of our pockets and there is no monetization yet.

But if someone is genuinely interested and wants to give it a try and keep in touch, here is the link:

https://empla.io/ai-employees/family-assistant

We are actively rolling out features and optimizing the experience all the time, so pardon the rough edges!

aryehof8 days ago

When I was a child, schools didn’t need to communicate on a daily, weekly (or even monthly) basis with parents. How times change. Heck, we went for a whole school day without having to talk to Mummy or Daddy. So this agent is technology to help the mess enabled by technology?

jkahrs5958 days ago

When you were a child you didn’t care (or weren’t aware) about your school’s communication with your parents. Can’t say that is surprising to me, you were a child.

Any thoughts on the subject as a parent with a child in school in the modern day? Or were you just eager to throw out a “back in my day”?

jhanschoo8 days ago

From hearsay, I hear that prestigious private schools tend to communicate very frequently, which manufactures value and evidence that the school has rich experiences for the students. And there may be a mutual expectation for parents to be "involved" in it, contrasted with families that require schools to serve as a childcare.

basch8 days ago

>multiple sources

how about when a kid has 7 classes, and each teacher says to just check the google doc within google classroom where they each type daily notes into unstructured tables that are each different for each class oh and parents dont actually have their own google classroom login they are just supposed to log into the kids account.

Also, family management is so *fundamentally broken* that it's disheartening and almost laughable that priority is ai over global acl management. There should not be a separate parental control dashboard for roblox, fortnite, instagram, tiktok, etc etc etc etc. Every app should be REQUIRED to expose all parental controls in a standard protocol upstream to identity management that is manageable by multiple management accounts in a family unit. I should be able to go into settings, click a kid, turn off chat for a child, and it instantly updates on my partners phone without needing an account at the service itself to manage it and knowing the ins and outs of how their parental controls are evolving weekly. Family settings should exist ABOVE any single user account and apply to all accounts to any service linked within the family.

robotbikes8 days ago

Something like this could be helpful but nobody should be willing to give up their families privacy and autonomy to a cloud solution ran by Google that could disappear at any point in the future. This is the kind of thing you want to have some level of control over and the ability to keep it going as long as it’s useful vs. rely on a corporation that has made its money datamining everything we do to sell advertising. Either they’ll eventually abandon it or worse case figure out how to load it with surveillance to sell targeted ads.

binary1328 days ago

One thing I kinda like about the slop era is that it’s not so hard to clone apps like this to run entirely on local LLMs

sparrish8 days ago

Will be shuttered in 3... 2... 1...

Cause it's Google.

I don't use new Google services. They've shut down too many that I loved and used daily.

OutOfHere7 days ago

And the new ones that are not shutdown are so buggy that they're not worth using. They're vibecoded junk, and their staff never reasonably fix user-facing bugs, so the bugs keep piling.

basch8 days ago

Its not even a new google service. its a google labs service. its experimental so they can learn and they will shut it down.

some_furry8 days ago

At least we know KilledByGoogle will never be starved for content.

ganoushoreilly8 days ago

The problem with anything AI google launches is that it's going to be fragmented across products with different teams building their own interpretations and it's just not going to work seamlessly. Most of their efforts now fail in one way or another and my guess is that it's just a symptom of how google builds things.

: /

jeena8 days ago

I'm doing something similar but not for the whole family, just for myself, both for home stuff and for work stuff (seperated), but I just give pi access to the tools and accounts I want it to use. I don't use google for anything other than watching YouTube so it would not work for me anyway. I have a knowledge base git repo which the agents use together to do things. The PDF filling thing is especially cool with a KB in the background because the Agent can fill in 99% of the things by itself. It also organizes my todo lists and my calendar.

sanex8 days ago

What do you do for communication with the agent?

jeena8 days ago

One is pi.dev on the console, but because the KB is a git repository I have it on each computer. On top of that I also run Hermes Agent and have set up there one agent to be responsible for the KB stuff and that one I connected to a Matrix channel and can use it from the phone and any device where I have a matrix client like Element set up.

With pi.dev I use it in a container https://git.jeena.net/jeena/agent-container and selectively give it access to Firefox via https://github.com/ThinkerYzu/foxmcp when I want it to help me with something in the browser (doing taxes, applying for things online in a foreign language, etc.)

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