One of the core commitments of AI is that the more it knows about a person, the better it can assist in completing tasks and provide appropriate advice. And if you believe what tech companies say, this requires applications and devices to constantly listen to, observe, or record user activities in order to collect as much contextual information as possible.
Obviously, continuous collection of user data raises concerns regarding privacy and data security. However, startups are still advancing such applications without any impact, firmly believing that the personalized assistant market is large enough to accommodate these concerns.
The former Plaud executive and the current Peter Mo are working on creating Ambi, doing something similar. The goal of this application is to provide users with real-time intelligence and insights by constantly listening to them.
The company stated on Monday that it had raised $26 million in multiple rounds of financing, led by Luminous Ventures. Luminous Ventures has invested in companies such as Meituan and Yushu Technology, and ODM manufacturer Huacin also participated in the investment.
Ambi will also launch iPhone, Mac, and Apple Watch applications. These applications function similarly to meeting note-taking tools, but users can choose to have them listen continuously in order to capture the context throughout the day.
The meeting recording company has been trying to automate a series of tasks that follow a meeting. These tasks are based on the summaries and action items collected during the meeting, and are carried out by connecting various software systems through numerous connectors. Ambi hopes to take it a step further by enabling their agents to start working even during the meeting itself.
The company claims that its AI intelligent entity can proactively offer suggestions or retrieve relevant knowledge during meetings based on the user's calendar, meeting schedules, knowledge base, and web page data. Users can also start tasks on one device and continue them on another.
Mo to TechCrunch says: "The way we interact with intelligence is limited. Many times, intelligence is confined to the screen; if you use hardware like Plaud, you have to wait for the recording to be sent to your phone, uploaded to the cloud, and then processed before you can get intelligent results. This is why we created Ambi to make AI available anytime, anywhere."
The company has even greater ambitions for information collection. Its upcoming desktop application will be able to monitor what users are working on and store important parts of that information in its memory, in order to provide more personalized suggestions. Applications like Littlebird or Minimi are already doing similar things.
This startup also plans to launch its own hardware devices, equipped with screens, speakers, cameras, and microphones, to capture context and display information.
Privacy Issues
The release of Ambi coincides with an increasing concern from the public regarding AI devices, which often lack sufficient indications to let users know that they are collecting data on the people around them. It is still unclear whether Ambi applications or upcoming devices will provide adequate warnings to inform third parties that their conversations are being recorded, in cases where users do not proactively disclose that they are using Ambi technology.
Some meeting recording tools have even been sued for recording others' conversations and data without consent. In addition, Apple's recently launched Voice Intelligence feature, which continuously transcribes voice, has also raised privacy concerns.
Mo states that users can disable the environmental data collection function in the Ambi app and device at any time, and that this function is disabled by default. The company claims it does not store user recordings and encrypts the data, but did not specify the encryption method used. Despite these measures, the responsibility for disclosing environmental data collection still rests with the user. He considers this a problem faced by the entire industry.
He said, "We must tell users that they need to explain to others about the environmental data collection. As an industry, we haven't yet solved this issue [of disclosure]. We have included as much information about disclosure as possible in various places, but if users try to hide their collection activities, we can't just resolve the problem that way."
Ambi currently has offices in San Francisco, Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen, with over 50 employees. The company is recruiting for positions responsible for market expansion as well as AI engineers who work on speech recognition models.
