2022年6月16日

Xembly的對話助手Xena在Slack上與一名員工互動，討論會議的安排和總結。當Siri和Alexa忙著給你提供當天的天氣預報或追蹤某個遙遠國家首都的名字時，Xena有工作要做。對話型人工智能領域的最新名字並不是亞馬遜(Amazon)和蘋果(Apple)使用的聲控助手。但Xena將與員工聊天，並處理一些可能讓員工在工作中陷入困境的任務。這項技術是Xembly的一部分，Xembly是一家初創公司，由會話分析公司Marchex的創始人和前首席執行官、首席執行官皮特·克裏斯托索盧共同創立;首席技術官傑森·弗拉克斯(Jason Flaks)是微軟Xbox Kinect和HoloLens產品的主要貢獻者;以及Qualtrics前全球增長負責人、首席信息官彼得•弗朗西斯。Xembly聯合創始人兼首席執行官Pete Chrisothoulou。Xembly是Madrona Venture Labs的一家公司，其早期客戶包括Twilio、Unearth和Pacaso等。Zillow前首席執行官、Pacaso聯合創始人斯賓塞•拉斯科夫(Spencer Rascoff)是Xembly的投資者。 Lightspeed Venture Partners is the startup’s lead backer and others include Ascend founder Kirby Winfield, DocuSign founder Tom Gonser, and former Microsoft CXO Julie Larson-Green. “Everyone deserves to be supported like the CEO and every company needs their workers focused on high value work,” Christothoulou said about the desire to create a digital executive assistant for knowledge workers. Advances over the past few years in AI and natural language processing have made that goal achievable and now Xembly aims to automate such things as scheduling meetings, creating agendas, taking notes, tracking action items, setting and managing to-do’s, and optimizing schedules. Xena is a “conversational agent” sitting on top of the Xembly platform. It can understand conversations in Zoom or Google Meet, on Slack, and in email. It detects intention and then surfaces that intention to accomplish tasks and create efficiency across those other workplace tools. After a Zoom call this week with Christothoulou and Flaks, Xena emailed me a meeting summary complete with action items — such as the need to follow up for screen grabs — and a bulleted recap of our 30-minute conversation. “When I exit a meeting, at the end of the day, I need to send out notes,” Flaks said. “And what’s most important is, recap the meeting for me, for people that didn’t go, and tell me what the action items were. That’s a big deal. And that’s been our core focus.” An example of a meeting summary created by Xembly. (Xembly Image) Launched in beta a year ago , Christothoulou initially set out to build something with Xembly that would rethink and improve meetings. The enterprise idea morphed into supporting workers in more ways. The tech is complicated from a conversational AI standpoint — Xembly has to be a good listener and an active participant in meetings. “We have to understand the whole dialogue,” Flaks said. “We have to maintain context, we have to understand if people are talking on top of each other.” Xembly then has to turn all of that into a summary that is readable and helpful. Christothoulou said competitors, such as the transcription service Otter, have “adjacent tools,” but no one is organizing a suite of products that sits across the worker ecosystem the way Xembly does. Flaks has more than 20 years experience in AI, ML and speech recognition technology. He spent six years at Marchex with Christothoulou, engineering the company’s conversational products. His experience has taught him that automation is a slippery slope. “If you can automate to the point that the user doesn’t have to do really any work or very little work, they love it,” Flaks said. “If you wind up having to do more work than you would have had to do if you just did it yourself, then it’s not helpful anymore.” Xembly employs 20 people, mainly in the Seattle area. Christothoulou, who is based in Los Angeles, said Xembly is not monetizing right now and the software will be free “for the foreseeable future.”