The smart bots are coming and this one is brilliant

Amy, a digital assistant who schedules your meetings, just raised $23 million

22

Last week I hired a personal assistant named Amy Ingram. She set up four meetings for me, adding them to my calendar with the relevant contact details included. She rescheduled twice when the person I was supposed to meet had to cancel at the last minute. Instead of sending half a dozen emails per meeting, I only needed to compose one to kick things off. This all sounds like pretty simple stuff, but Amy isn’t a human being: it’s a virtual assistant made by the New York City startup X.ai. Today the company announced a $23 million round of funding it will use to accelerate its development.

Amy exemplifies a new frontier in personal computing: the conversational smart bot. “There is a paradigm shift about to happen in how software is being delivered,” says Dennis Mortensen, the founder and CEO of X.ai. “I just don’t believe that apps is the future.” The data backs that up. Consumers are experiencing app fatigue: the average person downloads zero apps per month, and spends 80 percent of their time in just three of the apps they do use. That’s why an increasing number of developers are trying to circumvent the app store and reach consumers by making the basic email and messaging tools we use every day smarter.

“Instead of being assisted in doing a given job, you are handing it over to an agent,” says Mortensen. To make sure I could trust my new agent, Amy included me as a BCC on its first batch of scheduling emails. I have to admit, they were a lot more coherent and polite than the scheduling emails I usually send. Over time, Amy promises to learn my habits and plan my calendar to minimize the chance that I make an ass of myself.

Because the new model for interaction is conversation, bots can easily be launched from open protocols like SMS or email. I don’t need to find Amy in the app store, make space for it on my smartphone homescreen, or create a username and password. I give it access to my Google account, CC it on my email, and it goes to work from there. "That’s one of the big advantages I see between bots and apps," says Ben Brown, from the smart bot startup Howdy. "Let’s say I buy a plane ticket. The flight gets delayed and I get an SMS alert. But now I can reply to that message and ask questions? No downloading or discovery issues. No logins or passwords. I chat with the airline’s bot, and when I don’t need it anymore, it’s gone."

The potential for easy adoption explains why companies that failed to capture the smartphone market, like Facebook and Microsoft, are so bullish on bots. They see these helpers as a herd of tiny Trojan horses that could help it connect with consumers. At its annual developer conference last month, Microsoft laid out an ambitious vision for a future populated by bots that will book a hotel room or take orders for pizza delivery. It introduced tools that it hopes will make it easier for any developer or small business owner to build a bot. And it opened up widely used software platforms like Skype and Cortana so that developers can connect their bots to them. Next week, Facebook is expected to debut a bot store that will connect with its Messenger service, further accelerating the development of this ecosystem.

"If Microsoft doesn’t own the consumer front end, the way to reach them is to power all the businesses," says Shane Mac, CEO of another smart bot startup, Assist. "It’s still a consumer play, because if the local dry cleaner is using Microsoft’s bot engine, Microsoft is getting all that data to make the consumer experience better across everything they own."

Amazon, whose smartphone attempts also flopped, has its most exciting new business in the Echo, which features a smart assistant named Alexa you can control with your voice. Like Cortana and Siri, Alexa is the command and control bot, a generalized AI that can handle a variety of different tasks. But it can also connect you to various smaller bots with a much more limited and focused repertoire: Alexa, call me an Uber. Alexa, play me this song on Spotify.

"Not all bots have AI, and not all AI is a bot," says Brown. "What they do have in common is a reliance on conversation. Bots are a user interface to a service that is text or language based instead of based in a graphical user interface." That is one of the reasons many bot builders believe it will be far cheaper for businesses to create bots than mobile apps. "There are only three million or so apps in the store," says Mac. "There will be ten or a hundred times more bots."

Most of these bots won’t be as adaptable or conversationally fluent as Amy. "They will be search functions, powered by natural language —instead of filling out a form, or running a search, you essentially interact with a search functionality by going back and forth in a conversational framework," says Matt Turck, a venture capitalist who invested in X.ai. "You basically go back and forth to narrow down your choice, and the bot searches one or several databases to retrieve an answer."

The way Mortensen sees it, there will be two classes of digital assistants, the broad and the specific, or as it he calls it, "horizontal and vertical AI." Cortana and Siri are broad, horizontal AI: agents with a large, generalized knowledge of the world. You can ask them a lot of different questions, and they can handle a variety of situations, but they also get things wrong a lot. But if X.ai ever plans to make money off Amy, it can’t afford to make the same mistakes."We are hell-bent on being world class at this one thing – scheduling meetings. Not kind of half-assed at looking up a little bit of hotel rooms, doing a little bit of flights, no just really world class at scheduling meetings," Mortensen says.

In the week I used Amy, it handled every meeting request with aplomb, save for one, where someone asked if I would like to meet in person. It passed that along to me, and I picked things up from there. I actually didn’t see that as a failure. As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at the Build conference, "It’s not going to be about man versus machine, it’s going to be about man with machines." For now, smart bots need to be good at helping people, and that means knowing when to hand things off to a real human being.

Loading comments...