Category: Artificial Intelligence

The Data Science that Animates Amy

Data science is at the core of Amy Ingram, our AI personal assistant, and Data Scientists make up a big part of our team. To animate Amy (and her twin brother Andrew), we are teaching her to understand scheduling related emails. Teaching machines to parse natural language alone is a daunting challenge (and represents an…

Artificial Intelligence, Computing, Data

Stefanie Syman

How x.ai uses MongoDB to build Amy

Building and training your meeting scheduling assistant, Amy, from scratch requires an immense volume of data, flexible design models and a database that can handle it all. Our CTO and co-founder, Matt Casey, explains how as we see more and more use cases its important to have a Schemaless database that would support the dynamically…

Artificial Intelligence, Computing, Data

Raquel Ledezma-Haight

Bring Your Own Intelligent Agent (BYOA) is coming. What happens when it’s here?

Over the next half decade, as more AI intelligent agents come to market, employees will increasingly deploy a suite of agents to get their job done. Those employees who DO take advantage of these agents will become more productive and along with that more attractive (both internally and externally). Much like Bring Your Own Device…

Artificial Intelligence, Productivity

Dennis Mortensen

Almost there! How we’re starting to roll out the x.ai Professional Edition

We’re a data driven bunch at x.ai. It should go without saying really, given what we’re building. Delivering Amy and Andrew to the world at large is no different. We’re staging our move from closed beta into the market very deliberately. We want to make sure we’re getting all the details right from tiering of…

Artificial Intelligence, Startup

Dennis Mortensen

Is there really an incumbency advantage in AI? x.ai explains on The Twenty Minute VC

Harry Stebbings recently hosted Dennis on The Twenty Minute VC podcast to discuss a range of topics including: 1) The a-ha moment that led Dennis and team to found x.ai. 2) How the team has trained Amy and Andrew and which is more important: data or algorithms. 3) Many VCs are concerned that large incumbents like Google…

Artificial Intelligence, Startup, Vertical AI

Raquel Ledezma-Haight

Why supporting Microsoft Outlook.com and Office 365 calendars is a big deal for us

Whenever you set out to create something entirely new, you are faced with a slew of tough choices that boil down to: How can we limit our feature set to the barest minimum and still make something useful? It’s hard enough to create something, anything, and software always has its challenges. It’s orders of magnitude…

Artificial Intelligence, Calendar, Meeting Scheduling

Dennis Mortensen

Google, Amazon and the upcoming battle over AI Assistants

The stage is set for the coming battle between the big five tech giants: Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon (wait, make that four tech giants and one really tech savvy retailer). All are now heavily investing in AI. All now offer personal AI assistants poised to make your life easier. One of the most…

Artificial Intelligence

Dennis Mortensen

Amy on the Telly — CBS This Morning

On CBS This Morning, tech contributor Nick Thompson discussed how Amy schedules his meetings (she’s way better at it than he is, apparently). Nick also gave Andrew a shoutout. The segment on “How virtual assistants could change home and life” covered Siri and Alexa as well. Thrilled to be mentioned alongside such giants.

Artificial Intelligence, Startup, Vertical AI

Raquel Ledezma-Haight

The x.ai Story—Chapter 1

July 1, 2013 Dennis buys the x.ai URL at an auction. Expensive. Ouch. October 2013 Conversations with Alex about killing the inbox lead to the conclusion that meeting scheduling accounts for much of the bloat. Dennis actually counts how many meetings he scheduled in 2012. That number, 1,019, represents about 8,000 emails, and that’s…

Artificial Intelligence, Startup

Stefanie Syman

Using the Mongo Hadoop Connector as a Translation Layer to Spark

At x.ai, the data engineering team faces a fairly classic big data problem. We have lots of data, a prerequisite for high performance machine learning algorithms. Generally, as data scales up, engineering teams need to manage the increasing amount of time, memory, and cpu required for various computational operations. At x.ai, we use Spark—a framework…

Artificial Intelligence, Computing, Data

Ben Smith

Understanding the Facebook and Microsoft Chatbot Revolution

Microsoft and Facebook both recently announced that they will be heavily investing in bots. Each company has created an accompanying framework for developing chatbots, which you can use to deploy your own bots on their respective services—Skype and Messenger. Microsoft’s Satya Nadella is so bullish on bots that he spun up a Domino’s chatbot in…

Artificial Intelligence, Vertical AI

Dennis Mortensen

x.ai investing $23M in artificial intelligence for meeting scheduling

We’ve always seen the problem of a free or low-cost personal scheduling assistant as solvable through hard science and engineering rather than through outsourcing or new interfaces. We continue to believe in this mission and are doubling down as we invest an additional $23M to bring our AI to the mass market. Before I dig…

Artificial Intelligence, Startup, Vertical AI

Dennis Mortensen

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