If you are having trouble keeping track of your work and personal life, you are not the only one. Augment hopes that a PAI, if you will, will be the next best thing, learning from every digital interaction you have and providing the information you need before you even ask for it.
You are typing and I want you to stop. Five years ago you wrote about Atlas Informatics. What a memory you have. When Augment reached out to talk about the next generation of the idea, the founder of Atlas dropped off my radar.
The basic idea of Atlas was to make your entire online world locally accessible, from appointments and contacts to tab groups and purchases. Ritter explained to me that tying it to search seems to have been a mistake because searching for something assumes you know what you want. Our data is spread so widely that you might not remember anything.
We are building a learning artificial intelligence instead of searching. What is important to you is learned at its foundation. The first module that will be used is for people with a meeting-jammed life. At the end of the meeting we don't have time to do follow-ups because it's time for the next meeting, we don't remember everything, and we can't find all the communications in the moment. Augment helps you along with the apps you love.
It is a matter of good organization and not deep familiarity with the people or concepts involved that makes it so valuable to have this information at your fingertips. Not everyone has those skills, and it has gotten harder as we use more and more of the same things.
The solution used to be thought of as the appecosystem. Point solutions and pages of apps are now available.
It's possible to do everything on one service or a couple that are very close together. It's nice if you don't mind being at the mercy of a bunch of companies. He said that you could use us as a bridge across services.
There are examples of Augment in the picture.
The product is meant to help a person who is frequently unprepared or completely unaware of what is happening next. I am one of them. I was late for the meeting because of something. Cintra said that what they're solving for is context.
For their meeting with me, he showed an example of contact info, recent threads in email or other apps, info pulled in from whatever databases have me in it, as well as soft info like the topics I usually cover. If we had had previous meetings, it would have links to the recordings and summaries of the conversations that had taken place. You get action items tagged to people after the meeting.
This was all displayed via a native app that pops up before and after meetings, but browsers can be "augmented" as well, with a browser overlay that has the artificial intelligence popping up with information where it's appropriate.
There is a video of Augments in action.
This is not pulled in through an application programming interface. Augment's agent collects and organizes it on their own systems.
The data is being streamed as it comes because of where we sit. What is that location? Since the agent will have access to your browser, it is necessary for it to operate.
Atlas recall was intended to work with searching in Augment.
I said that anyone who works in IT or security would probably not be able to hear him. Every service has a point of failure that gathers data from it.
Ritter acknowledged that there might be some skepticism, but that they were careful to build for security and privacy from the start and make sure users own their data from top to bottom. He pointed out that it may be a while before enterprises are comfortable with this level of meta-organization. They are targeting individual prosumers at the moment.
Flying Fish and JAZZ Venture Partners led a $3.5 million seed round for Augment that included participation from Incisive Venture and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
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