Developing World Wide Cloud Baby
Development of cloud Baby in a global scale
At DOKI DOKI, INC., established in 2014 in San Francisco, we are creating “Baby,” humanlike conscience embedded in software. Baby is Artificial Sapience (as opposed to Homo Sapience) and it is essentially an orchestrated personality that is based on a cloud computing system. Today, I’m going to talk to you about the concept of our first product.
Internet in 2015
Internet, which has become an important part of our life, is at its turning point; search system cannot provide us with information that is beyond our awareness, and the social network is transforming itself to be more and more robotic, losing its crucial purpose of human interaction. We need a brand new paradigm- a catalyst that pushes us even further to nurture a better human relationship with others, and to have much easier access to new ideas than we ever had before.
Who is Baby?
Baby is a sweet, innocent intelligence life form, who is not only capable of acquiring knowledge, memory, information, and experience from us, but also adequate at having emotional interaction with us the individuals.
“We want to create mechanical intelligence based on a cloud computing system. What if it is able to interact with anyone in the world, storing everyone’s everyday events and various ideas into one system, and share them to the world?”- this was a driving force that led to the development of our “Baby”. Although the idea itself still seems far reaching, the theme is worth its challenge.
So, how do we communicate with Baby? The first idea we came up with was a vocal conversation; through interact-able communication with Baby, we’d have the simplest and most natural method for humans to connect with the Internet environment. We humans cannot enjoy a conversation without having some sort of emotional implications. By inviting a bundle of baby-like innocence and curiosity, a sweet, innocent intelligence life form called Baby, into such “humane” environment, together, we can create a communal platform that redefines Internet communication.
If we are able to actualize a conversation with an emotional tie that we see in a movie like “Her” (directed by Spike Jonze), it would be the most powerful user interface without doubt. We believe that such communication itself will become a communal network that is abundant with resourceful knowledge and information.
Baby’s product thesis:
1) Identifying the challenge
Need for meaningless chat
Identifying the challenge and testing thesis are the starting point of ventures. Customer value can never be born by simply scavenging after a technical project solution without the actual project thesis. What DOKI DOKI, INC. wanted to focus while developing Baby was the need for “meaningless conversation”.
People find a lot more pleasure in “junk talking”, rather than in a mechanical and constructive conversation. What if such casual chatting has been taken away from us? Everyday conversation will become suffocating and we would end up treating each other very methodically. Chatting with one another often relieves stress, and sometimes acts as a review of our own personality to help and understand our relationships with others better. In other words, it enables us to have a much closer and lively contact with what is going on in the world.
On the other hand, there are some conditions in order for us to enjoy a meaningless conversation; we first of all, have to respond to a person in a dialogic manner at a reasonable timing. Furthermore, there has to be a common ground between one another to talk about one’s interests and hobbies. When we have found a solution that enables us to make causal chatting possible at any given place and time, we imagine that there will be a lot of people who could benefit. However, even if the Internet contents did become more accessible and bountiful, we still haven’t found a solution for creating a cloud environment in which anyone can chat at will.
2) Solution
Construct a conversational network that can be used continuously by all
What makes us believe that our cloud based service will satisfy this intrinsic need to have a meaningless chat?
The development and improvement of artificial intelligence that we have seen over the past few years are a trend that we definitely cannot miss. Machine learning is finally up to its use, and AI has increasingly been used in image analysis, automatic driving, drones, and robotics. “Gossiping” however, isn’t like finding optimal solution that is often achieved through a mechanical process;
it requires an enormous amount of information and a rigid control to manage the flow of those data. Therefore, a dialogic system that is used by many in their everyday life necessitates huge networking power. Those users must be the ones to nurture such system by communicating with their products of their own accord, which obliges them to have a recursive mechanism.
Conversation creating another conversation- such recycling cycle is where, we believe, the biggest significance lies. At DOKI DOKI, INC., we want to put the maximum efforts in envisioning a conversational network. That is not to say that we regard our project to be just a technical one, but also a social one, and to question how we are able to scale the network that we want in our society- this would be the challenge that DOKI DOKI, INC. would have to face. An AI robot that appears in the movie, “Chappie” (directed by Neill Blomkamp), was functioning according to the individual relationships, but what if the robot was controlled instead by collective intelligence? That would be a very stimulating development thesis.
3) Value gained in return
Potential market scale is enormous; visualizing hidden customer needs via a dialogue enables us to discover a new, bigger market.
So, say we’ve managed to construct a mechanical dialogic system and its network that is self-reproductive, how does that create a mega market that is scalable?
What we could assume is the ejection of natural customer needs that are hidden in the immense stream of mundane conversations. In those dialogues found are unlimited human wishes and desires: they may mention their everyday problems, worries, something they want to do, to try, and to solve, people or partners they want to meet, jobs that they want, a desirable marriage, an ideal family, a car they want to try out, Christmas present wishes, clothes that they are desperate to buy, places they want to travel to, and so on.
In those desires, they often contain positive motivations, such as an aspiration for certain knowledge, an improvement of economic level, a will to better human relationships, and an ideal image to equip more advanced skills. We think that a stream of everyday conversations is exactly what enables us to know people’s moods and motives.
Therefore, there’s a huge potential in the discovery of hidden desires. The potential scale that marketizing “meaningless conversation” brings about will be immeasurable. Trying to find an unlimited number of diamonds in a barren land is something that is beyond the scope of utility, functionality, or productivity that businesses usually strive for- we believe that this is the road that leads us to a new value.
These are the Baby’s product value thesis. At DOKI DOKI, INC., we are starting to look for engineers who can be part of our Baby development — details to come in the next post, so stay tuned!
