If you schedule a meeting next time, and an assistant named ‘Andrew’ or ‘Amy’ corresponds with you, then there is a good possibility that you could be chatting with a robot made by x.ai. Founded in 2014, x.ai is squarely focused on making one thing better and that’s, the scheduling of meetings. With x.ai robots, you will never know the difference between a human and robot.
What makes x.ai robots different?
The process of scheduling a meeting can be a tedious task, but x.ai thinks, its personal assistant can remove all your problems. One has to simple cc: [email protected] or cc: [email protected], and he or she will take over the task. This new technology is quite different from others.
“There can be no ambiguity,” said CEO Dennis Mortensen. “If you say, ‘let’s do one,’ what does that mean? Is it one o’clock? Is that pm? Is it EST? Amy has to understand the intent along with the date, time, location, people involved and constraints.”
What makes x.ai’s offering possible is the combination of neural networks, deep learning, machine learning and other artificial intelligence techniques. Mortensen said, “We need accuracy at a level so high that we try to find the best technique for each distinct problem.”
The key capability of understanding the full text and context of emails and not just the key words, makes the x.ai robots sound better than others. Another capability of the x.ai robots is generating text that sounds like it came from a human.
Mortensen said ‘Andrew’ needs to have this idea of what dialogue is about to happen, and make sure the conversation doesn’t go around in circles. And this makes conversation understandable, removing boatloads of potential ambiguity.
“You can’t be in doubt about what’s going on, and if someone needs to postpone or cancel, Andrew needs to understand that that is an unfortunate thing,” Mortensen said. Though, Andrew will do what needs to be done to make it happen.
Growing popularity of x.ai’s robots
Even though x.ai is still in beta, the number of meetings scheduled through its robots is growing. It was up by 27% in February and another 28% increase in March, the company said. Mortensen said every year, more than 10 billion meetings are scheduled in the U.S. alone.
So far, x.ai brought its total funding to almost $35 million including a fresh $23 million in Series B funding on Thursday. The company plans to use the new funds in expanding its data-science team and push rollout of its pro and business editions later this year.
