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AI-Powered Meeting Scheduler X.ai Raises $9.2M Series A

104 points by danielrm26 12y ago

junto 12y ago
My new web app is a big data AI dynamic tooling process management social engagement change tool. Can I have some money thrown at me please?
- dmortensen 12y ago
  hey man, ..we just schedule meetings! :)
  - eli_gottlieb 12y ago
    Yes, exactly his point. Scheduling meetings doesn't get more exciting because you strap some statistical natural-language processing to it and call it "AI", as if that was a meaningful term.
    - dmortensen 12y ago
      It's not supposed to be exciting; 87 US knowledge workers schedule a little bit above 10 billion meetings a year. I just want to help them do that (no more, no less). Users couldn't care less how it is done and I would be very hesitant to market this under any "AI"/STAT/ML/NLP moniker. So back to my starting point - we just schedule meetings.
NhanH 12y ago
Now that's the first startup I've been excited to read about in a while. It seems to be a very sensible first step in solving the "email inbox is our new todo list" [0] that pg mentioned a few years ago. If they actually success (sadly, it seems they're still in some kind of beta mode), there is a whole vertical of gazillions things with regards to email that they can follow up on. Interestingly, in a sense as more people are using it, there's a chance that the technical aspect get easier (two x.ai users try to schedule something!). At least until a (hypothetical and will never happen) scenario in which every single email users will be using x.ai, at which point the program turns into a giant optimization and scheduling program, which will be hard - just something fun to think about. Also, holy buzzwords and business-speak, I really like the startup, but I feel uneasy reading the article. [0]: http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html
zapt02 12y ago
What happens when two Amy's talk to each other?
- petercooper 12y ago
  when two people using x.ai try to schedule a meeting (and regardless of whether one is on Google Calendar and the other on Exchange for example), then meetings get immediately scheduled without any of the usual back and forth.
  - dmortensen 12y ago
    * https://x.ai/faq/#two-robots-one-meeting https://x.ai/faq/#two-robots-one-meeting :)
- aaronsnoswell 12y ago
  I was going to ask exactly the same thing!
Synergyse 12y ago
Interesting idea and nice execution. Should real assistants be worried?
- dmortensen 12y ago
  Not really. I honestly think the current assistant and all his human ingenuity could be better utilized on other tasks.
deleted 12y ago
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deleted 12y ago
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pmontra 12y ago
What if one doesn't use any calendar product? I usually agree with my business partners on a date/time by voice, then more often than not they create a GC event (probably to mark it in their agenda) and I get an email that I don't answer. They know I'll be there. I guess that x.ai is valuable if people don't talk each other and let it decide the time of the meeting but it probably works only if one annotates all his/her life in a calendar.
- dmortensen 12y ago
  Amy (The AI Assistant) remember all the meetings she set up for you (and she'll remind you if needed) - so even if you did not have a calendar, she would avoid conflicts (unless you hide things from her). We have this fantasy (delusion perhaps) of us becoming arbiters of time. You don't need a calendar, because Amy will help manage your time. One step at a time though and the problem is hard enough as is, before we print "Arbiter of Time" t-shirts.
  - mkolodny 12y ago
    How does Amy know what time to schedule the first meeting she sets up for you? Do you have to suggest a couple of times? Or do you have to set up a Google Calendar for Amy?
jpatokal 12y ago
Note that Amy isn't actually all AI: > Q. Is Amy human? > A. I am one part machine, and one part Human! The important part is that I handle your requests properly all the time. https://x.ai/faq/ https://x.ai/faq/
- dmortensen 12y ago
  The human part is a data annotation part, something which helps us move towards full automation. There is obviously no way a human operation will ever get to the end of those ~10 Billion formal meetings being scheduled in the US every year. Heck, we might die trying to fully automate this and we are certainly not finished yet, but I think we are off to a good start and we are fighting for that 100% Automation goal every single day. Feel free to email me if you want to join 24 other propellerheads on that mission :)
  - strebler 12y ago
    A treacherous path you tread, seeking 100% automation...hmmmm
    - dmortensen 12y ago
      My bad, let me rephrase, near 100%. Super naive perhaps, but we feel it is worth a shot. Hell, we might die trying, but we'll certainly come out a whole lot wiser on the other side.
hooande 12y ago
If this product develops successfully and gains adoption, it will be a huge deal. I've heard repeatedly that scheduling is one of the biggest problems that executives have and it's one of the main reasons that they get personal assistants. It's good to have someone to get coffee or pick up laundry, but scheduling back and forth is a tedious task that takes up a lot of time. I've been thinking about an ai solution to this for awhile now, it's good to see one emerge and be used in the wild. The concept of a good ai based personal assistant is one of the Next Big Things. And I mean facebook size big thing. If the busiest and most important people in society start doing all of their scheduling through one software platform it won't be long before everyone else follows. And that opens the door to all kinds of other social and communication services. "Have your bot talk to my bot and we'll figure out a good time to meet up". Maintaining a list of your friends and contacts is important, but algorithmically maintaining your relationships and schedule is even moreso. Ton of value here waiting to be unlocked. As with all data based applications, the value increases exponentially with the amount of data being analyzed. The ideal personal assistant is one that will make the same decisions that you would make in the absence of instruction. If you tell a PA "book dinner reservations for my wife and I next thursday", a good assistant will know what kind of restaurant is appropriate, where you like to sit, whether you prefer dinner at 7:30 or 8:30, etc. You don't have to say, because they learn your preferences from the data they've collected from you and previous employers. Just like a computer would. There are a ton of small breakthroughs and conceptual leaps to be made between there and where we are now and the field is still wide open. x.ai seems like an encouraging step in that direction, one that I'll be watching closely.
- soup10 12y ago
  I think you could accurately say machine learning is a subfield of ai. I think of it as the mathematical toolbag with which many ai applications are built. (Before he edited his post OP had a comment about the confusion between the terms 'machine learning' and 'artificial intelligence')... Put another way I think machine learning specifically refers to the mathematical ideas used to teach things to a machine, and the ai to the resulting entity which often makes use machine learning techniques(usually in addition to specialized code specific to the application). I think some people feel that "general intelligence" would require a paradigm that somehow transcends math and algorithms which seem to only result in specialized a.i's. And that maybe it all needs to be tossed out and re-examined with a blank slate. On the other hand, i would suggest that specialized ai software will become more and more generalized until we can't tell the difference. I think it's all about having a sane perspective. In this day and age with machines and gadgets in every room, man-made artifacts teach us how to think, and we teach machines how to think in a recursive interdependent cycle. In that sense reaching the final goal post means progressively improving our machines to be active communicators and good listeners, to the point where they can learn things from each other. Eventually their interactions will become complex enough that their communications will be unpredictable but still productive on the whole. So we'll leave them on so they can talk. At which point you could call it a society of machines.... Anyway I guess the point is specificity of language seems to be important learning and thinking about AIs.
beams_of_light 12y ago
I work at a Fortune 50. Eventually, it'd be great to have something like x.ai "watching" emails fly through an internal SMTP server, and then decide if parties external to the conversation ought to be involved. There's a good amount of effort duplication and projects which fall short of their true potential because the right humans weren't involved.
- xerophyte12932 12y ago
  Sure it sounds cool that if Alice asks Bob about some internal API and Bob says he doesn't know about it much, the system should suggest involving Carl who actually wrote the API. But who would want a system to read their emails? Heck even if you imagine the whole situation in real life, where you randomly pop in between two strangers and give them a suggestion (no matter how useful) they will consider you a creep for eavesdropping on them. Do this often enough and you are bound to be chased through the streets by an angry mob. Plus, think of all the times the AI doesn't understand the conversation and makes crappy suggestions. Like each time that API is cmentioned, suppose the system says "involve Carl! He's a Pro". i Can see this getting annoying really fast
blazespin 12y ago
This is pure astroturf. There are dozens of solutions already for this, not to mention most corporations you can just view someone's calendar and pick a time whenever everyone is available.
- timlin 12y ago
  Have you attempted to schedule a meeting with 3 busy people in your company with 3 busy executives and PMs from a client? It is annoying and frustrating. Most of the solutions I'm familiar with require all scheduling parties to be on the same Exchange Server with calendar busy/away shared. Or you have to click-thru to a website and then deal with creating a user account. Using email seems like a nice friction-free way forward. I hope they get traction!
  - jacalata 12y ago
    Sure - but the solution usually involves deciding who the least important attendees are, scheduling it over their busy calendar times whenever it suits the execs, and expecting them to suck it up. I don't see how AI is going to help with that.
igrekel 12y ago
Definitely sounds promising, I spend a lot of time either seeing up meetings myself or syncing with people who need to invite me to one. The FAQ actually answers none of the questions I ask myself in considering to try it. Is it good at dealing with timezones? I always get invited to meetings where people give me the time in their timezone, I have to realize that time wouldn't make sense for them if it was in my timezone etc etc. The other question is regarding the fact that I don't communicate with everyone in english. There is no mention of how good Amy is when switching to and from different languages. This last one is one of the reasons I never used virtual assistants.
- pearb09 12y ago
  Amy (the "AI Assistant") loves timezones and does exactly what you suggest. Speaks to each participant in their local timezone, understand what time it is for each participant so no silly suggestions are made, and she understands the concept of compromise when somebody in New York is to meet with a guy in Singapore (where no great time really exist for either party). https://twitter.com/thinkstorm/status/554776145800232960 https://twitter.com/thinkstorm/status/554776145800232960 Finally, she only understands English today (2015). We are super ambitious, but we want Amy to perfect one language at a time. dmortensen keeps pitching for Danish as Amy's next language around the office...we'll see.
  - igrekel 12y ago
    Definitely sounds promising, will give it a try
bojo 12y ago
The series starting with "Avogadro Corp" by William Hertling comes to mind. Looking forward to our AI overlords.
bsenftner 12y ago
His points about specialized AIs are spot on. I have a specialized AI start up where we trained software to do realistic 3D reconstruction of humans. Our AI simply knows how to go from photo to 3D via knowledge of the human face. We inter-operate with conversational agents to create lip syncing knowledge base backed avatars. www.3D-Avatar-Store.com is the site. We're constantly learning of and meeting with other specialized AI companies and combining efforts to create pretty interesting pipelines of capabilities for various projects.
dj-wonk 12y ago
Good personal assistants (e.g. executive assistants) also base their information on information not available in email; e.g. conversations and non-verbal cues. Good ones carefully guard and (implicitly) prioritize their boss' time. I am skeptical that an AI lacking such information would have the necessary data to replace a human.
- w1ntermute 12y ago
  It doesn't have to replace a human, it just has to reduce the work that has to be done by one to a degree that paying for X.ai is a compelling proposition.
- olefoo 12y ago
  Doesn't need to replace a human; just needs to be Good Enough™ to save the human 80% of the time they would spend in unproductive back and forth. Just like a dishwasher is not a replacement for a scullery maid; and won't individually polish each piece of silverware like a proper butler. This doesn't need to be a human level fully rounded intelligence imbued with common-sense. It just needs to be able to reconcile schedules and locations and travel times.
aleyan 12y ago
To get pleasantries out of the way, I am glad to see Matt Turck here on HN. The meetup he hosts, Data Driven NYC, attracts a large number of both very high caliber of guest speakers and attendees. The several times I have been there, I enjoyed the presentations and the discussions afterwards thoroughly. X.ai which I was introduced to at this meetup, was one of the more interesting startups there. If I wasn't as happy as I am at Handy, x.ai would be foremost among companies I would consider working at; their challenges are many. This is one of the highest endorsements can be bestowed upon a firm and its product by an engineer. While x.ai is very exciting, I have several concerns about their product and their chances at success. 1) Most meetings are scheduled internally within a firm where calendars are visible and shared. An AI PA that simply locks down time slots doesn't have much value add beyond what the calendars currently provide. 2) There are privacy concerns. Many will not trust x.ai with their calendar data due to concerns about x.ai data-mining or sharing their data. 3) There are other privacy concerns. People may not trust Amy and Andrew not to be social engineered by others to leak their calendars. The fact that person is busy at a certain time or for a certain duration or within a certain vicinity is potentially useful to people whose goals are more than just scheduling a meeting. This kind of over sharing may not be worse than goes on with Facebook, but the letters A.I. will make it sound scarier. My last point is a wish. Most of my non-work meetings are scheduled over #1 text messaging and #2 Facebook. I would like to see x.ai support other mediums than just email.
- lbotos 12y ago
  Why does the A.I. part of the situation make social engineering scarier?
  - aleyan 12y ago
    1) Perceived Risk. AI makes any activity 10 times scarier than same activity without. People will irrationally fear that their AI PA turns into HAL 9000[1] or their self-driving car turns into Project Satan[2]. 2) Actual Risk. Software has bugs. When software is meant to give out some subset of data it is not unknown for it to give out more data than it means to. A human PA may make mistakes and blurb something that he/she shouldn't have, but he/she also knows when to stop giving out information. If a particularly trained AI starts leaking out information, it will happily do so for user after user after user. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000 [2] http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki/Project_Satan http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki/Project_Satan
fchollet 12y ago
Forcing humans to use written natural language when dealing with a machine (complete with politeness formulas, etc) seems like a dreadfully inefficient UX. Why force users to type several sentences (minutes wasted on a mobile device) when a couple taps/click in a GUI would suffice? Not to mention the risk for ambiguity that lies in natural language processing (unless this company has already solved the problem of strong AI?).
- woah 12y ago
  Why conversational tone on hn Hn users programmers Understand efficient style Sarcasm in post
- yummyfajitas 12y ago
  Amy (the humanized name of the X.ai bot) is about the worst and most intrusive business tool I've encountered. My business partner uses the "amy" bot. It likes to spam me with 20 questions about when to schedule a meeting, each time asking me for other times whenever something doesn't work. And god help me if I ever forget to put an "IST" after every single time I mention. If I send it "8PM IST, 9PM IST or 10PM", there is a good chance it will give me a 10PM EST meeting. In contrast, consider doodle (http://doodle.com/ http://doodle.com/), which is exactly the GUI you are imagining. It shows me a grid of possible times. I click the times that are good. It detects my location and automatically displays times in IST. Takes me about 15 seconds to use with no confusion. X.ai seems to be solving the problem of "I wish I had a secretary, but can't afford one". That's not the same problem as "lets schedule meetings in the most efficient way possible". Dear x.ai folks, if any of you are reading this thread: please clone doodle and stick an x.ai/doodle link into the amy emails. If you do this, I'll consider deleting the gmail filter which currently blocks all emails from x.ai.
  - zaroth 12y ago
    Doodle is interesting, thanks for mentioning them. But I was exploring their product and come to find they list SSL as a paid feature on their "Private" plan. SSL is really, truly not a paid feature. I found that off-putting and a bit shameful.
anemitz 12y ago
This looks very similar to https://claralabs.com https://claralabs.com. Is the tech / process basically the same between the companies?
- snowmaker 12y ago
  They are competitors. But neither has released details on how the tech behind the scenes works.
lightlike 12y ago
Much of the wording on their website is annoyingly imprecise -- > N-Gram, the latter part of her surname, is a technique used in computational linguistics. it's not a technique; it's just a name for a sequence of n things. Also, I've never seen the 'N' or 'G' capitalized.
- dmortensen 12y ago
  Well, Matt Casey and I thought it was clever, if not a bit funny; Amy Ingram, A.I. and Ngram in one. What's not to like!? :-)
  - jzwinck 12y ago
    Here are some people who are not going to like it: https://www.linkedin.com/vsearch/p?firstName=AMY&lastName=INGRAM https://www.linkedin.com/vsearch/p?firstName=AMY&lastName=IN... [105 of them as I write this...plus their coworkers.]
    - dmortensen 12y ago
      I am not sure I would be offended if somebody called a service "Dennis" (probably the opposite). That aside, use Andrew Ingram instead, or name her yourself and move her to your domain (the most obvious premium product we have in mind).
zeratul 12y ago
Many points raised here are valid concerns and should be addressed by the data scientists when designing the system. Let's just not forget about the positives here: there is a company that openly uses term "A.I." and raised a lot of money. Am I the only one here waiting for the AI Winter to be over [1]? Maybe it's not the best A.I., yet, but they got the funding. Personally, I think that's great and I hope for others to come out of the closet. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter
- fchollet 12y ago
  The AI winter has been over for a couple years, we're in the middle of a torrid summer right now (triggered by the deep learning craze). There is a rush in the VC world to throw millions at any new AI startup, especially if it has "deep learning" in its pitch deck. So far it has paid out, because large tech companies (Google, Facebook, Baidu, etc.) have been on a deep learning startup acqui-hiring spree. It might not last, though. Any company that bases its marketing on "AI" and subsequently fails to deliver is bringing us closer to the next AI winter.
alexatkeplar 12y ago
I've signed up and am looking forward to giving X.ai a go. The thing I'm puzzled by is how Amy can possibly follow the most important rule of physical meeting scheduling, namely: "you go to the money, the money doesn't come to you". In other words: vendor goes to startup founder's office, startup founder goes to VC's office, VC goes to LP's office... How does Amy know enough about your business hierarchy to respect that rule?
- xerophyte12932 12y ago
  The question is DOES it follow the most important rule?
- zaroth 12y ago
  I think generally you would tell Amy where you expect to meet up-front, although the example in the ad copy makes it sounds like location is negotiable, and indeed somehow the algorithm can deduce the rules and social mores. One way to think about it, if the first thing the algorithm can do is score its own confidence in its "level of contextual understanding" and "confidence score in the decision" then X.ai can put thresholds in place that get the threshold emails into the hands of actual humans when they need to be. If the goal is 'up to 100% automation', the idea is exploit the 80/20 rule to launch quickly, and then pour money into making 80% -> 99%. So I guess the crucial question is, does the algorithm know its own limits? The interesting pressure relief valve, is if a location isn't calculable with a high enough certainty, Amy would kindly ask her operator for assistance in resolving the quandary.
- dmortensen 12y ago
  Absolutely agree. We must understand the social dynamics that are inherently built into every meeting - and this is one 4 major challenges we are working on going forward. But our early beta users should not be to shy to cue in Amy: - Amy, set something up with Lerer in Soho - Amy, can you arrange breakfast with Matt and FirstMark please. They can pick a place. - Amy, setup a data science / whiteboard chat for Prateek and I * * My default meeting location is 48 Wall (Amy knows that, and simply assume I want this location used for a new candidate interview)
zaroth 12y ago
Does the highly conversational tone make it easier or harder to parse? Because, I for one, would feel uncomfortable using such a conversational tone with an algorithm. I'm curious if they are encouraging anthropomorphism because... Amy will succeed more often in parsing this style of writing? This is how people *want* to talk to their AI scheduler? People should think of "Amy" as maybe a little-bit human? People should *confuse* "Amy" with a human? The more natural tone will increase user engagement? I for one would write to my AI scheduler in a much more direct tone. "Will miss tomorrow's 1pm", "Reschedule John, late next week.", "Will get in Wednesday after noon.", etc. No "Hi Amy", no complete sentences, no banter for me at least. It does remind me a bit of "Her", and the premise that one should not be overly colloquial with one's computers. Edit: I just went to the site and saw the ad copy for 'How it works'. It appears the answer is closer to making the Amy algorithm actually appear human. Users pretend they are CC'ing a real person, and unless the other participants on the email know better, they converse with amy@x.ai as if it really is a human? That is ELIZA territory and trying to actually beat the Turing test is a lofty goal indeed, I think far surpassing the challenge of merely scheduling meetings.
- timClicks 12y ago
  Looking at the jobs page, it looks as if the Amy AI doesn't exist yet. Amy will be a large corps of low paid staff until she has lots of training data.
- dmortensen 12y ago
  - We've seen that the response data is more rich in this style of writing - We've seen that "Normal's" want to talk to their assistant without Syntax (my biggest worry is one of early users creating some artificial syntax) - I like the idea of people seeing Amy as a little-bit human (it helps with the above two). I might be off on this one. - We tell the guest that we are an AI Assistant (so no hiding) - We hope it will increase user engagement, we do not know yet. You'd be surprised how much text is annotated as "gratitude" :-)

104 points by danielrm26 12y ago

junto 12y ago

My new web app is a big data AI dynamic tooling process management social engagement change tool. Can I have some money thrown at me please?

dmortensen 12y ago
hey man, ..we just schedule meetings! :)
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  Yes, exactly his point. Scheduling meetings doesn't get more exciting because you strap some statistical natural-language processing to it and call it "AI", as if that was a meaningful term.
  - dmortensen 12y ago
    It's not supposed to be exciting; 87 US knowledge workers schedule a little bit above 10 billion meetings a year. I just want to help them do that (no more, no less). Users couldn't care less how it is done and I would be very hesitant to market this under any "AI"/STAT/ML/NLP moniker. So back to my starting point - we just schedule meetings.

NhanH 12y ago

Now that's the first startup I've been excited to read about in a while. It seems to be a very sensible first step in solving the "email inbox is our new todo list" [0] that pg mentioned a few years ago. If they actually success (sadly, it seems they're still in some kind of beta mode), there is a whole vertical of gazillions things with regards to email that they can follow up on. Interestingly, in a sense as more people are using it, there's a chance that the technical aspect get easier (two x.ai users try to schedule something!). At least until a (hypothetical and will never happen) scenario in which every single email users will be using x.ai, at which point the program turns into a giant optimization and scheduling program, which will be hard - just something fun to think about. Also, holy buzzwords and business-speak, I really like the startup, but I feel uneasy reading the article. [0]: http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html

zapt02 12y ago

What happens when two Amy's talk to each other?

petercooper 12y ago
when two people using x.ai try to schedule a meeting (and regardless of whether one is on Google Calendar and the other on Exchange for example), then meetings get immediately scheduled without any of the usual back and forth.
- dmortensen 12y ago
  * https://x.ai/faq/#two-robots-one-meeting https://x.ai/faq/#two-robots-one-meeting :)
aaronsnoswell 12y ago
I was going to ask exactly the same thing!

Synergyse 12y ago

Interesting idea and nice execution. Should real assistants be worried?

dmortensen 12y ago
Not really. I honestly think the current assistant and all his human ingenuity could be better utilized on other tasks.

deleted 12y ago

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deleted 12y ago

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pmontra 12y ago

What if one doesn't use any calendar product? I usually agree with my business partners on a date/time by voice, then more often than not they create a GC event (probably to mark it in their agenda) and I get an email that I don't answer. They know I'll be there. I guess that x.ai is valuable if people don't talk each other and let it decide the time of the meeting but it probably works only if one annotates all his/her life in a calendar.

dmortensen 12y ago
Amy (The AI Assistant) remember all the meetings she set up for you (and she'll remind you if needed) - so even if you did not have a calendar, she would avoid conflicts (unless you hide things from her). We have this fantasy (delusion perhaps) of us becoming arbiters of time. You don't need a calendar, because Amy will help manage your time. One step at a time though and the problem is hard enough as is, before we print "Arbiter of Time" t-shirts.
- mkolodny 12y ago
  How does Amy know what time to schedule the first meeting she sets up for you? Do you have to suggest a couple of times? Or do you have to set up a Google Calendar for Amy?

jpatokal 12y ago

Note that Amy isn't actually all AI: > Q. Is Amy human? > A. I am one part machine, and one part Human! The important part is that I handle your requests properly all the time. https://x.ai/faq/ https://x.ai/faq/

dmortensen 12y ago
The human part is a data annotation part, something which helps us move towards full automation. There is obviously no way a human operation will ever get to the end of those ~10 Billion formal meetings being scheduled in the US every year. Heck, we might die trying to fully automate this and we are certainly not finished yet, but I think we are off to a good start and we are fighting for that 100% Automation goal every single day. Feel free to email me if you want to join 24 other propellerheads on that mission :)
- strebler 12y ago
  A treacherous path you tread, seeking 100% automation...hmmmm
  - dmortensen 12y ago
    My bad, let me rephrase, near 100%. Super naive perhaps, but we feel it is worth a shot. Hell, we might die trying, but we'll certainly come out a whole lot wiser on the other side.

hooande 12y ago

If this product develops successfully and gains adoption, it will be a huge deal. I've heard repeatedly that scheduling is one of the biggest problems that executives have and it's one of the main reasons that they get personal assistants. It's good to have someone to get coffee or pick up laundry, but scheduling back and forth is a tedious task that takes up a lot of time. I've been thinking about an ai solution to this for awhile now, it's good to see one emerge and be used in the wild. The concept of a good ai based personal assistant is one of the Next Big Things. And I mean facebook size big thing. If the busiest and most important people in society start doing all of their scheduling through one software platform it won't be long before everyone else follows. And that opens the door to all kinds of other social and communication services. "Have your bot talk to my bot and we'll figure out a good time to meet up". Maintaining a list of your friends and contacts is important, but algorithmically maintaining your relationships and schedule is even moreso. Ton of value here waiting to be unlocked. As with all data based applications, the value increases exponentially with the amount of data being analyzed. The ideal personal assistant is one that will make the same decisions that you would make in the absence of instruction. If you tell a PA "book dinner reservations for my wife and I next thursday", a good assistant will know what kind of restaurant is appropriate, where you like to sit, whether you prefer dinner at 7:30 or 8:30, etc. You don't have to say, because they learn your preferences from the data they've collected from you and previous employers. Just like a computer would. There are a ton of small breakthroughs and conceptual leaps to be made between there and where we are now and the field is still wide open. x.ai seems like an encouraging step in that direction, one that I'll be watching closely.

soup10 12y ago
I think you could accurately say machine learning is a subfield of ai. I think of it as the mathematical toolbag with which many ai applications are built. (Before he edited his post OP had a comment about the confusion between the terms 'machine learning' and 'artificial intelligence')... Put another way I think machine learning specifically refers to the mathematical ideas used to teach things to a machine, and the ai to the resulting entity which often makes use machine learning techniques(usually in addition to specialized code specific to the application). I think some people feel that "general intelligence" would require a paradigm that somehow transcends math and algorithms which seem to only result in specialized a.i's. And that maybe it all needs to be tossed out and re-examined with a blank slate. On the other hand, i would suggest that specialized ai software will become more and more generalized until we can't tell the difference. I think it's all about having a sane perspective. In this day and age with machines and gadgets in every room, man-made artifacts teach us how to think, and we teach machines how to think in a recursive interdependent cycle. In that sense reaching the final goal post means progressively improving our machines to be active communicators and good listeners, to the point where they can learn things from each other. Eventually their interactions will become complex enough that their communications will be unpredictable but still productive on the whole. So we'll leave them on so they can talk. At which point you could call it a society of machines.... Anyway I guess the point is specificity of language seems to be important learning and thinking about AIs.

beams_of_light 12y ago

I work at a Fortune 50. Eventually, it'd be great to have something like x.ai "watching" emails fly through an internal SMTP server, and then decide if parties external to the conversation ought to be involved. There's a good amount of effort duplication and projects which fall short of their true potential because the right humans weren't involved.

xerophyte12932 12y ago
Sure it sounds cool that if Alice asks Bob about some internal API and Bob says he doesn't know about it much, the system should suggest involving Carl who actually wrote the API. But who would want a system to read their emails? Heck even if you imagine the whole situation in real life, where you randomly pop in between two strangers and give them a suggestion (no matter how useful) they will consider you a creep for eavesdropping on them. Do this often enough and you are bound to be chased through the streets by an angry mob. Plus, think of all the times the AI doesn't understand the conversation and makes crappy suggestions. Like each time that API is cmentioned, suppose the system says "involve Carl! He's a Pro". i Can see this getting annoying really fast

blazespin 12y ago

This is pure astroturf. There are dozens of solutions already for this, not to mention most corporations you can just view someone's calendar and pick a time whenever everyone is available.

timlin 12y ago
Have you attempted to schedule a meeting with 3 busy people in your company with 3 busy executives and PMs from a client? It is annoying and frustrating. Most of the solutions I'm familiar with require all scheduling parties to be on the same Exchange Server with calendar busy/away shared. Or you have to click-thru to a website and then deal with creating a user account. Using email seems like a nice friction-free way forward. I hope they get traction!
- jacalata 12y ago
  Sure - but the solution usually involves deciding who the least important attendees are, scheduling it over their busy calendar times whenever it suits the execs, and expecting them to suck it up. I don't see how AI is going to help with that.

igrekel 12y ago

Definitely sounds promising, I spend a lot of time either seeing up meetings myself or syncing with people who need to invite me to one. The FAQ actually answers none of the questions I ask myself in considering to try it. Is it good at dealing with timezones? I always get invited to meetings where people give me the time in their timezone, I have to realize that time wouldn't make sense for them if it was in my timezone etc etc. The other question is regarding the fact that I don't communicate with everyone in english. There is no mention of how good Amy is when switching to and from different languages. This last one is one of the reasons I never used virtual assistants.

pearb09 12y ago
Amy (the "AI Assistant") loves timezones and does exactly what you suggest. Speaks to each participant in their local timezone, understand what time it is for each participant so no silly suggestions are made, and she understands the concept of compromise when somebody in New York is to meet with a guy in Singapore (where no great time really exist for either party). https://twitter.com/thinkstorm/status/554776145800232960 https://twitter.com/thinkstorm/status/554776145800232960 Finally, she only understands English today (2015). We are super ambitious, but we want Amy to perfect one language at a time. dmortensen keeps pitching for Danish as Amy's next language around the office...we'll see.
- igrekel 12y ago
  Definitely sounds promising, will give it a try

bojo 12y ago

The series starting with "Avogadro Corp" by William Hertling comes to mind. Looking forward to our AI overlords.

bsenftner 12y ago

His points about specialized AIs are spot on. I have a specialized AI start up where we trained software to do realistic 3D reconstruction of humans. Our AI simply knows how to go from photo to 3D via knowledge of the human face. We inter-operate with conversational agents to create lip syncing knowledge base backed avatars. www.3D-Avatar-Store.com is the site. We're constantly learning of and meeting with other specialized AI companies and combining efforts to create pretty interesting pipelines of capabilities for various projects.

dj-wonk 12y ago

Good personal assistants (e.g. executive assistants) also base their information on information not available in email; e.g. conversations and non-verbal cues. Good ones carefully guard and (implicitly) prioritize their boss' time. I am skeptical that an AI lacking such information would have the necessary data to replace a human.

w1ntermute 12y ago
It doesn't have to replace a human, it just has to reduce the work that has to be done by one to a degree that paying for X.ai is a compelling proposition.
olefoo 12y ago
Doesn't need to replace a human; just needs to be Good Enough™ to save the human 80% of the time they would spend in unproductive back and forth. Just like a dishwasher is not a replacement for a scullery maid; and won't individually polish each piece of silverware like a proper butler. This doesn't need to be a human level fully rounded intelligence imbued with common-sense. It just needs to be able to reconcile schedules and locations and travel times.

aleyan 12y ago

To get pleasantries out of the way, I am glad to see Matt Turck here on HN. The meetup he hosts, Data Driven NYC, attracts a large number of both very high caliber of guest speakers and attendees. The several times I have been there, I enjoyed the presentations and the discussions afterwards thoroughly. X.ai which I was introduced to at this meetup, was one of the more interesting startups there. If I wasn't as happy as I am at Handy, x.ai would be foremost among companies I would consider working at; their challenges are many. This is one of the highest endorsements can be bestowed upon a firm and its product by an engineer. While x.ai is very exciting, I have several concerns about their product and their chances at success. 1) Most meetings are scheduled internally within a firm where calendars are visible and shared. An AI PA that simply locks down time slots doesn't have much value add beyond what the calendars currently provide. 2) There are privacy concerns. Many will not trust x.ai with their calendar data due to concerns about x.ai data-mining or sharing their data. 3) There are other privacy concerns. People may not trust Amy and Andrew not to be social engineered by others to leak their calendars. The fact that person is busy at a certain time or for a certain duration or within a certain vicinity is potentially useful to people whose goals are more than just scheduling a meeting. This kind of over sharing may not be worse than goes on with Facebook, but the letters A.I. will make it sound scarier. My last point is a wish. Most of my non-work meetings are scheduled over #1 text messaging and #2 Facebook. I would like to see x.ai support other mediums than just email.

lbotos 12y ago
Why does the A.I. part of the situation make social engineering scarier?
- aleyan 12y ago
  1) Perceived Risk. AI makes any activity 10 times scarier than same activity without. People will irrationally fear that their AI PA turns into HAL 9000[1] or their self-driving car turns into Project Satan[2]. 2) Actual Risk. Software has bugs. When software is meant to give out some subset of data it is not unknown for it to give out more data than it means to. A human PA may make mistakes and blurb something that he/she shouldn't have, but he/she also knows when to stop giving out information. If a particularly trained AI starts leaking out information, it will happily do so for user after user after user. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000 [2] http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki/Project_Satan http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki/Project_Satan

fchollet 12y ago

Forcing humans to use written natural language when dealing with a machine (complete with politeness formulas, etc) seems like a dreadfully inefficient UX. Why force users to type several sentences (minutes wasted on a mobile device) when a couple taps/click in a GUI would suffice? Not to mention the risk for ambiguity that lies in natural language processing (unless this company has already solved the problem of strong AI?).

woah 12y ago
Why conversational tone on hn Hn users programmers Understand efficient style Sarcasm in post
yummyfajitas 12y ago
Amy (the humanized name of the X.ai bot) is about the worst and most intrusive business tool I've encountered. My business partner uses the "amy" bot. It likes to spam me with 20 questions about when to schedule a meeting, each time asking me for other times whenever something doesn't work. And god help me if I ever forget to put an "IST" after every single time I mention. If I send it "8PM IST, 9PM IST or 10PM", there is a good chance it will give me a 10PM EST meeting. In contrast, consider doodle (http://doodle.com/ http://doodle.com/), which is exactly the GUI you are imagining. It shows me a grid of possible times. I click the times that are good. It detects my location and automatically displays times in IST. Takes me about 15 seconds to use with no confusion. X.ai seems to be solving the problem of "I wish I had a secretary, but can't afford one". That's not the same problem as "lets schedule meetings in the most efficient way possible". Dear x.ai folks, if any of you are reading this thread: please clone doodle and stick an x.ai/doodle link into the amy emails. If you do this, I'll consider deleting the gmail filter which currently blocks all emails from x.ai.
- zaroth 12y ago
  Doodle is interesting, thanks for mentioning them. But I was exploring their product and come to find they list SSL as a paid feature on their "Private" plan. SSL is really, truly not a paid feature. I found that off-putting and a bit shameful.

anemitz 12y ago

This looks very similar to https://claralabs.com https://claralabs.com. Is the tech / process basically the same between the companies?

snowmaker 12y ago
They are competitors. But neither has released details on how the tech behind the scenes works.

lightlike 12y ago

Much of the wording on their website is annoyingly imprecise -- > N-Gram, the latter part of her surname, is a technique used in computational linguistics. it's not a technique; it's just a name for a sequence of n things. Also, I've never seen the 'N' or 'G' capitalized.

dmortensen 12y ago
Well, Matt Casey and I thought it was clever, if not a bit funny; Amy Ingram, A.I. and Ngram in one. What's not to like!? :-)
- jzwinck 12y ago
  Here are some people who are not going to like it: https://www.linkedin.com/vsearch/p?firstName=AMY&lastName=INGRAM https://www.linkedin.com/vsearch/p?firstName=AMY&lastName=IN... [105 of them as I write this...plus their coworkers.]
  - dmortensen 12y ago
    I am not sure I would be offended if somebody called a service "Dennis" (probably the opposite). That aside, use Andrew Ingram instead, or name her yourself and move her to your domain (the most obvious premium product we have in mind).

zeratul 12y ago

Many points raised here are valid concerns and should be addressed by the data scientists when designing the system. Let's just not forget about the positives here: there is a company that openly uses term "A.I." and raised a lot of money. Am I the only one here waiting for the AI Winter to be over [1]? Maybe it's not the best A.I., yet, but they got the funding. Personally, I think that's great and I hope for others to come out of the closet. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter

fchollet 12y ago
The AI winter has been over for a couple years, we're in the middle of a torrid summer right now (triggered by the deep learning craze). There is a rush in the VC world to throw millions at any new AI startup, especially if it has "deep learning" in its pitch deck. So far it has paid out, because large tech companies (Google, Facebook, Baidu, etc.) have been on a deep learning startup acqui-hiring spree. It might not last, though. Any company that bases its marketing on "AI" and subsequently fails to deliver is bringing us closer to the next AI winter.

alexatkeplar 12y ago

I've signed up and am looking forward to giving X.ai a go. The thing I'm puzzled by is how Amy can possibly follow the most important rule of physical meeting scheduling, namely: "you go to the money, the money doesn't come to you". In other words: vendor goes to startup founder's office, startup founder goes to VC's office, VC goes to LP's office... How does Amy know enough about your business hierarchy to respect that rule?

xerophyte12932 12y ago
The question is DOES it follow the most important rule?
zaroth 12y ago
I think generally you would tell Amy where you expect to meet up-front, although the example in the ad copy makes it sounds like location is negotiable, and indeed somehow the algorithm can deduce the rules and social mores. One way to think about it, if the first thing the algorithm can do is score its own confidence in its "level of contextual understanding" and "confidence score in the decision" then X.ai can put thresholds in place that get the threshold emails into the hands of actual humans when they need to be. If the goal is 'up to 100% automation', the idea is exploit the 80/20 rule to launch quickly, and then pour money into making 80% -> 99%. So I guess the crucial question is, does the algorithm know its own limits? The interesting pressure relief valve, is if a location isn't calculable with a high enough certainty, Amy would kindly ask her operator for assistance in resolving the quandary.
dmortensen 12y ago
Absolutely agree. We must understand the social dynamics that are inherently built into every meeting - and this is one 4 major challenges we are working on going forward. But our early beta users should not be to shy to cue in Amy: - Amy, set something up with Lerer in Soho - Amy, can you arrange breakfast with Matt and FirstMark please. They can pick a place. - Amy, setup a data science / whiteboard chat for Prateek and I * * My default meeting location is 48 Wall (Amy knows that, and simply assume I want this location used for a new candidate interview)

zaroth 12y ago

Does the highly conversational tone make it easier or harder to parse? Because, I for one, would feel uncomfortable using such a conversational tone with an algorithm. I'm curious if they are encouraging anthropomorphism because... Amy will succeed more often in parsing this style of writing? This is how people *want* to talk to their AI scheduler? People should think of "Amy" as maybe a little-bit human? People should *confuse* "Amy" with a human? The more natural tone will increase user engagement? I for one would write to my AI scheduler in a much more direct tone. "Will miss tomorrow's 1pm", "Reschedule John, late next week.", "Will get in Wednesday after noon.", etc. No "Hi Amy", no complete sentences, no banter for me at least. It does remind me a bit of "Her", and the premise that one should not be overly colloquial with one's computers. Edit: I just went to the site and saw the ad copy for 'How it works'. It appears the answer is closer to making the Amy algorithm actually appear human. Users pretend they are CC'ing a real person, and unless the other participants on the email know better, they converse with amy@x.ai as if it really is a human? That is ELIZA territory and trying to actually beat the Turing test is a lofty goal indeed, I think far surpassing the challenge of merely scheduling meetings.

timClicks 12y ago
Looking at the jobs page, it looks as if the Amy AI doesn't exist yet. Amy will be a large corps of low paid staff until she has lots of training data.
dmortensen 12y ago
- We've seen that the response data is more rich in this style of writing - We've seen that "Normal's" want to talk to their assistant without Syntax (my biggest worry is one of early users creating some artificial syntax) - I like the idea of people seeing Amy as a little-bit human (it helps with the above two). I might be off on this one. - We tell the guest that we are an AI Assistant (so no hiding) - We hope it will increase user engagement, we do not know yet. You'd be surprised how much text is annotated as "gratitude" :-)