Rand Hindi will save you three seconds when your friend WhatsApps you the address for tonight's party.
Sure, connecting that address to Uber or Citymapper won't change the world. But it's an example of how his AI app Snips is aiming to make your phone more human. "We're putting artificial intelligence in your phone, so it can adapt to your situation," says Paris-based Hindi, 30, the company's co-founder and CEO.
With Snips on your device, the multi-stage process of looking up an address - jumping from an email via the home screen to copy-and-paste text into Citymapper or Google Maps - is reduced to a single tap. The app's natural-language processing and machine-learning software identifies an address, guesses what you are going to do and provides a pre-filled solution. "Snips aggregates your data and links that to the apps that are relevant," says Hindi. "The point of the product is to learn so much about you and what you do, that it does it for you."
But apps are just the start. Snips learns your habits and preferences by applying more than 20 algorithms to your messages, calendar, contact list and background location. It's a daunting collection of private material, but Hindi, who has a PhD in bioinformatics, assures WIRED its data is safe: the 27-person company, which has raised $6.3 million (£4m) in seed funding, conducts almost all its analysis on your device, and sends none of your data to its servers. "A company that says they need your data is lying," he says. "Or has no clue how to build technology."
Hindi looks forward to a world where a range of intelligent devices will anticipate our commands. Far from undermining our freedom, he believes, this technology is safeguarding it. "I don't want everything I do to be a consequence of a device," he says. "If you put an AI in every device, you can start, as a human, to not pay attention to it any more."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
