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Artificial intelligence (AI) software provider x.ai has announced the launch of the Professional version of its personal assistant product.
The personal assistant, Amy – or twin brother Andrew – schedules meetings on behalf of users, saving plenty of admin time. All users need to do is connect their calendars to x.ai, and cc Amy or Andrew, who does the rest.
The beta version was launched in June 2014, and since then the New York-based startup has been building up its data set and infrastructure. According to Dennis R. Mortensen, x.ai CEO, the key to launching a professional-grade version was playing the waiting game.
“Teaching a machine to understand natural language, even using the most advanced data science, is by any definition super hard. Add to that the fact that meeting scheduling is a high accuracy setting,” he said. “So it was important for us to wait to roll out a paid product until we felt Amy was smart enough to schedule meetings nearly flawlessly.”
Customers already using the Professional product include Walmart, Salesforce, LinkedIn, and The New York Times, as well as Astronomer, a data science engineering platform. “Once I had access to Amy, I was able to consistently schedule twice as many meetings with a small fraction of the effort,” said Ry Walker, Astronomer CEO. “There’s no question in my mind that x.ai has helped me move faster to do my real job, which is to build a great company.”
The full name of the assistants are Amy and Andrew Ingram. The initials referring to AI are obvious, but the remainder of their name, ‘N-Gram’, is a reference to a computational linguistics and probability technique.
x.ai uses the MongoDB NoSQL database to power its personal assistants, and writing for sister publication CloudTech in December last year, Kelly Stirman, VP strategy, discussed the importance of the correct infrastructure in powering AI initiatives. “Cloud computing solved the two biggest hurdles for AI: abundant, low cost computing and a way to leverage massive volumes of data,” he wrote. “Small, focused, cloud-based algorithms are going to be the AI that changes our lives over the next decade. It’s better to solve one problem really well than it is to solve 100 problems poorly.”
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