My (human) friend and I were recently debating the idea of someone marrying a robot. In the movie Her, Theodore (a person) and Samantha (an AI) develops an intimate relationship that is supportive and mutually consensual. Will/should the ideals of marriage equity include AIs? Weird? Society once thought a lot of other marriages were out of “da norm”. [0]
Realistically, we won’t be worrying about marrying robots (on any real scale) in 2017, but we will be relying ever more so on talking to our AI friends for everything in our lives. The next generation will grow up as AI Natives.
“Siri, make me a sandwich.”
— millions of iPhone users
We know our old friends Siri, Cortana, Alexa, and their less talkative cousins Watson and Einstein already, but we want to know who are our other new AI friends we need to know in 2017 to improve our productivity, health and knowledge.
I also asked the founders of some of these companies to contribute an idea with the following prompt:
“What is something important in AI and ML that people aren’t paying attention to today, but in a year or so will become really important?”
#10: Ozlo
Need a friend to help you figure out how to get the best eating and drinking experience around town? Say hello to Ozlo. Ozlo’s first area of expertise is around the things we do every day like eating. Over time Ozlo will learn about many other facets of our lives and be gradually more and more helpful. It’s a friend you can learn to trust.
Also meet: Ozlo’s cousin Bo. Bo knows. In particular Bo can help you book a haircut or a yoga sesh.
#9: Clara
Clara helps you with the repetitive and tedious work in your life. The core product today helps you with meeting scheduling and follow ups. The engine is being trained by humans and improves with each email sent. As the company grows, I would expect Clara to be able to handle a range of other projects like finding docs and sending files. Clara is active 24/7 and is $199–499 a month. Now that is an employee you can depend on!
Maran (co-founder & ceo): 1/ Creating defensibly strong training environments for machine learning is key. 2/ De-mystifying AI and ML for consumers and investors. Eliminating the intimidation factor.
#8: Butter
Information is like water flowing freely everywhere, except inside organizations, then it’s more like butter — it can be a solid (and not flowing at all between people) or a near liquid depending on how well internal systems and processes are set up. Butter aims to make it super easy to find all the information within an organization. They should be coming out of their (stealth) cocoon in 2017. As they say, asking coworkers for help is so 2016.
Jack (cofounder + ceo): In 2016, AI assistants set the wrong expectations. AI assistants shouldn’t imitate a human or make you feel stupid for not saying the right thing. They should augment your intelligence, not pretend they’re going to replace it…until they can.
#7: Mezi
Finally, a product that helps us spend less time booking our travel plans (darn paradox of choice on the many dozens of travel websites). Mezi is far more than just a convenience, it is your helper in everything travel. Give Mezi a try and soon you will be calling it your BFF in getting the best flight, hotel, tickets for new eye-opening experiences and much more.
Swapnil (cofounder + ceo): The ‘do it yourself’ nature of online travel booking sites today is time consuming and lacks personalization. AI, NLP and deep learning allows for a whole new layer of personalization and curation that goes beyond just discovery for its users providing a concierge-type service from discovery to purchase. We’ve designed Mezi to act as a personal travel agent, which learns from users’ preferences and applies them to conversations in the future, making for a more ‘do it for you,’ integrated experience which is far more personal and high touch than anything that exists today.
#6: Penny
Millennials enjoy going to talk to their financial advisors as much as they like visiting their dentist (based on my survey of one 29 year old millennial who I know very well). Penny chats with you and gives you advice and coaching on how to spend, save, and invest better. A penny saved is a penny earned.
Mitch (cofounder): ML is just another engineering tool; the rules of making good products still apply.
#5: Jibo
Nearly all pet owners in America considers their pets to be members of the family. Now they can add Jibo to the family. Jibo is an emotional robot who interacts with family members and learns over time to greet, tell jokes, read stories, MC games. The possibilities are endless. Jibo doesn’t need to be walked.
Steve (ceo): An essential future application of artificial intelligence and machine learning will be personal robots who learn from interactions with people, and the data they gather through a variety of sensorial inputs. That data could be spoken inputs from voice dialog, or observed behavioral patterns (e.g. a household member’s daily breakfast time), or data gleaned from an individual’s content choices (sports teams, weather locations), or dialog about appointments gleaned from digital calendar access. The next frontier of AI will be automated learning from social interactions between people and mechanical others.
#4: Tara
Looking to build a new product? Tara can hep you. In fact, Tara will chat with you to understand what are your product specs and work with a curated group of contractors to finish your project. Tara manages the back and forth and with each project gets smarter and faster at organizing the work to produce a high quality product with lightning fast turnaround.
#3: Kylie
Always be closing. Those are the famous words of Alec Baldwin’s character in Glengarry Glen Ross. In the world of business (and particularly sales), precision, persistence, pragmatism are the hallmark of an effective team member. Kylie, with 24/7 attention, quick email writing learning, and a memory that remembers to follow up on every lead, is ready to charge out and win you some new business.
Jamasen (cofounder + ceo): A key component in long term value add AI rests in generalized machine learning. Simply put, developers should be looking into how to create models that can help humans think and come up with an answer faster than humans could without AI. If we can create a technology that knows what you should say and how to say it, we could create much more efficient and smarter people. Companies & developers are too focused on finding insights or automating data entry. In 1–2 years, it will seem obvious that AI should empower smarter & more efficient human thought.
#2: Remy
Meet Remy. The world’s smartest medical AI.
So goes the tagline for Remedy Health’s product, a smart chat friend who can help analyze your symptoms and concerns. Remy works alongside top doctors so that a patient can get both human touch and machine precision. Using the learnings from some of the top healthcare professionals in the world, Remy is able to recommend the best care possible and help your doctor focus on you rather than the administrative work. And you bet Remy is HIPAA-Compliant.
Remy fun facts: 1) appointments are only $30, even if you don’t have insurance and 2) the product became the most upvoted health and fitness product on Product Hunt (and reached that milestone in less than 12 hours after its public launch) and most upvoted virtual assistant on Product Hunt of all time.
Nikhil (cofounder + chief scientist): One of the major reasons that highly regulated industries have been slow to adopt machine learning tools is a lack of human interpretability. Just as no manager making a high value decision would trust a conclusion made by an associate lacking a logical rationale, it is difficult to trust an algorithm when you cannot interpret why it is making a certain recommendation. Especially in healthcare, human-in-the-loop machine learning systems will need to be able to communicate the rationale behind their outputs if they are to influence problems where every individual decision has significant importance.
# 1: Romeo
Welcome to our Jetson future! Romeo is the 3rd robot in the Softbank Robotics family. At 140cm (4'6" for you Americans), Romeo is able to open doors, climb stairs and reach objects on a table. The primary focus will be on assisting people who are losing their autonomy, but the company is working hard on a 2nd phase of the project to expand Romeo’s capacity to be even more helpful. Over time, personal helpers and companions like Romeo will become more intelligent and dynamic in many more ways. This is just the beginning.
Please hit the ❤ button on Medium if you enjoyed this. Disclosure: I’m a real (imperfect) human. Read this as op-ed, not news.
