charli.ai’s digital personal assistant that employs AI to organize a user’s life is expected to enter beta this summer. Known as Charli, this personal assistant promises to do everything from finding all related documents in email and cloud storage systems to organizing receipts and tax filings.
VentureBeat sat down with charli.ai founder and CEO Kevin Collins to better understand how AI is about to transform the way we all work.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
VentureBeat: What exactly does Charli do?
Kevin Collins: It’s really about keeping yourself organized and finding what you need. If you go into email and try to find something you’re looking for, it’s a nightmare trying to search for it. If you’re going into your cloud storage to find documents that you filed a year ago, it’s a nightmare to find them. Charli is really about keeping your digital content organized, allowing you to find things instantly when you need to find them. That includes files that you might be keeping in email or cloud storage, but it also includes links to the internet. We get inundated with links to every piece of content that’s out there. [Keeping] track of it can just be handed off to Charli.
VentureBeat: Sounds like everybody can now have their own digital assistant?
Collins: We wanted Charli to be like that personal assistant for you. We’ve got a whole natural language processor in the front end of it that Charlie can understand. For example, if I say “Charli, show my expenses for this month,” it will understand that. It’s also designed for speech that we haven’t yet integrated. We haven’t integrated with Alexa or Google. We’re still at an early stage. We’re coming out of our beta program in the summer. The whole idea about Charli was providing a personal assistant for me. The name Charli is a bit of a play on chief of staff. We dropped the E because we wanted [the name] to be gender-neutral.
VentureBeat: Sounds like everybody can now have their own digital assistant?
Collins: We wanted Charli to be like that personal assistant for you. We’ve got a whole natural language processor in the front end of it that Charlie can understand. For example, if I say “Charli, show my expenses for this month,” it will understand that. It’s also designed for speech that we haven’t yet integrated. We haven’t integrated with Alexa or Google. We’re still at an early stage. We’re coming out of our beta program in the summer. The whole idea about Charli was providing a personal assistant for me. The name Charli is a bit of a play on chief of staff. We dropped the E because we wanted [the name] to be gender-neutral.
_______
This article was originally published by Michael Vizard for Venture Beat on July 6, 2021. Read the full article on venturebeat.com