Recipe for successful product development for “Baby” and engineer intern recruitment
DOKI DOKI, INC. is a start-up company founded in June, 2014 based in San Fransisco. We are developing Baby — Artificial Sapience, humanlike conscience embedded in software.
I am pleased to make an announcement that as of today, we are officially looking for an engineer who wants to join our endeavor to develop “Baby,” a cloud computing system based on a communication enhancement device. It 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. Our goal is to create an environment whereby we can take joy in teaching Baby new knowledge, personality or emotions through conversational communications, and to provide us all with the chance to marvel at the fruits of our concerted global effort that is Baby, the Artificial Sapience.
Read on for more about our recipe for success or project visions! These are subject to change as we make progress on product development, and we want you to get involved in the visionary creating processes!
This will be a global project, and we are looking for some one who is willing to take on new challenges. Strongest candidate for this position would be someone who can generate innovative ideas and execute them at the same time. The development base will be both in Kyoto and Silicon Valley, but you can work from anywhere on earth, at the prototyping stage. Also, no need to make a full-time commitment at this stage, and knowledge of AI is not a must. Bilingual candidate preferred. Initially, AI development environment is going to be on IBM’s Watson.
One: Start out with a small market
Assumption: there is no such a thing as a “gossiping-marketing” (at least for now!)
We believe that we have an innate desire to have an unproductive, meaningless chat, and yet, there is no specific market to fulfill such need. This is because not only the desire to have a meaningless chat is considered to be somewhat “negative”, but also many assume that communication has to be mechanical and pragmatic, not meaningless and unproductive. Many communication platforms already exist in the market, such as SNS or message services, but none we perceive as a platform for meaningless chat.
Also, there already exist countless AI solutions with an emphasis on usability, functionality, or features to enhance productivity, search-ability etc. With Baby, we focus on none of these explicit values; these are indeed facilitating our everyday technology-related activities, i.e., obtaining best match for your search, or getting good recommendations, and the list goes on, but we have plenty of products out there already providing these values, and these are not the product values we are striving for.
We are committed to develop an computerized human-like personality, that allows us to have endless, tireless meaningless conversations anytime at any place. What, though, motivate us to keep interaction going with a personified computer? We believe that communication has to be intriguing — an element of surprise, or spontaneity (children are naturally good at having such conversation!! ) is vital to this “intriguing” communication, and this we cannot achieve without having some sort of humanness in the communication itself.
And that “humanness in communication” is not driven by knowledge or intellect — it is mainly driven by emotions.
We can say that what Baby essentially does is digitalizing emotions and operating them. This is where we are headed, and now we are collecting numerous conversation patterns to for prototyping.
Two: Go against conventional wisdom. Innovate like a rebel.
Having an endless chat with a virtual personality — what an absurd idea! We have to admit, that is a normal reaction when people hear our product thesis and our vision.
People only talk among people — we believe that this is just an presumption people make based on their habitual thinking patterns. For those who have anti-technology propensity, this may sound like an abhorrent idea.
Even among genuine technology-savvy geeks, this may raise many eyebrows. But this is exactly the kind of challenge we are wiling to tackle — we are after creating a new value.
Three: Power of Kawaii (cute)
Assumption: Innocence and cuteness can be strong motivations in communication with a computer
We cannot overlook the importance of the power of cuteness, or in Japan we have a special term reserved for things that are adorable, Kawaii. We humans are biologically predisposed to find joy in caring for innocent, weak creatures, and that is one of many reasons why we adore babies or pets. If we were able to build a platform for us to enjoy conversation with a cute, innocent life form, that would set us apart from other highly efficient AI solutions out there and hence give us a unique competitive edge.
We are adamant about keeping it Kawaii because it is something that so obvious yet none ever took notice of its importance. Kawaii or cuteness is power in itself! How can two seemingly completely different properties coexist, artificial personality and cuteness? I think that is a tough challenge, but it’s worth tackling.
Digging deeper in the discussion, we are faced with the question: “how we are going to digitize human emotions?” This is a key question the highlight our Baby’s uniqueness if we can come up with a concrete solution, and so far, we believe “affection” is the key.
We naturally strive for better when we are treating small children or animals. More innocent, more positive and overall better demeanor is often employed when we are engaged in affectionate communication.
If you feel affection towards Baby and communicate with it with care, the feedback it gives would be of immense value; Baby will be communicating with others with care in turn, then it accumulates better, more humane knowledge and emotions as a result of these heart-felt communications.
So for us, “affection” can be the center of a mechanism that support our product value, just like “LIKE” is for Facebook, and review system is for Uber or Airbnb.
OK, time to create Baby together!
These are just a fragment of what we are discussing daily at DOKI DOKI. If you are interested in getting onboard with us, please come and join us!
We are creating device for meaningless chat; you get the idea — we want you to be driven to be innovative and take on new challenges!
We value action over theory, and anyone who is willing to take action is welcome. Please contact via taka@d0kid0ki.com. You can also reach us at LinkedIn or on Facebook.
Preferred skills:
- Development experience in application for smartphone (iOS, Android)
- Embedded software related development skills (C, CC++, has at least played around with Arduino or mbed)
- Development skills relevant to server communication (JSON, socket communication)
- Experience in Python, Ruby, PHP etc..
