The Future of Remembering, Article III: Effortless Recall UX, for Everyone
This is the third piece in a four-part series from the Personal AI (personal.ai) Team. The personal.ai team enables individuals like you to create a Personal AI that always remembers, so you never forget. Just how the team is making that happen will be explored through four distinct lenses: Scientific, Technological, Design, and Entrepreneurial. The third article is from Kristie Kaiser, Co-founder and Head of Design at Personal AI.
My grandfather lived with dementia for 20 years of his life and eventually passed away in April of 2018. At first, the disease didn’t seem so bad. It mostly affected his short term memory. He would forget the name of a person he just met or where he left his house keys. But as time progressed, I witnessed the slow deterioration of his brain as it crept into his long-term memory. He slowly forgot what day of the week it was, he forgot his favorite TV shows to the point where he could watch the same episode on repeat, and he even forgot his favorite flavor of ice cream. Then came the moment when he forgot me, and then eventually, my mother.
At my last company Aira, I helped lead product and design for a service that provided on-demand eyes for the blind. We used technology to solve the problem (lack of access to visual information) and saw firsthand how it unlocked human potential. With personal.ai , I see the same opportunity — the potential impact is limitless.
“Don’t solve the human, solve the problem” - Suman Kanuganti founder of Personal AI and Aira
This is the mantra I’ve heard my mentor and co-founder, Suman Kanuganti, say over and over again. I heard it on my first day at Aira and lived that mantra in everything I did. I empathized with our users, learning about digital accessibility and some of the challenges they face with access to information that most of us take for granted. As I embarked on this new journey with Suman at personal.ai, this mantra naturally became the north star of what we are building with our AI technology.
Memory retention is a biological problem. Instead of focusing on fixing people with brain enhancement drugs or surgical implants, we built a tool to solve the problem. We do this by capturing a user’s spoken conversations and written thoughts throughout their day and create their personal digital memory bank, which we call a Memory Stack. We use our own AI models to transform this information into a rich digital memory, preserved and available to recall forever. Sounds cool, right? So now that we’ve captured and created these digital memories, how do you “remember”? That’s where the real design challenge comes in.
Near Perfect Recall as a Challenge
Think of the tools you use today to remember. They probably include note-taking apps, digital documents, written notes, and online messages. The problem with these tools and methods is that the information you’re capturing is already lossy because you have already started forgetting pieces of the information you learned when you go to write it down. Now, think about all the times you’ve tried to find information in these different tools. 20% of our day is spent searching for information. That’s where we come in. Our goal is to reduce the time people spend looking for information by creating an ambient recall experience. This experience should be effortless, in the moment, and require little action from the user.
We achieve this recall experience by creating a user’s own personal AI. A user’s AI is built on top of their own Memory Stack, making the AI an extension of that person who will express thoughts, feelings, and ideas to augment that individual.
The Recall UX
The recall user experience has three main categories:
Recall in the Moment — instantaneous recall without taking any actions similar to human biological memory. Our UX is designed after Ambient computing concepts, where computing co-exists alongside you, augmenting you in the moment (think Gmail predictions). Our goal is to have each AI live in all the applications the user is already in. Personal AI is with you in Gmail, Zoom, Slack, and so on so you can recall in the moment.
Recall on Demand — interactive recall with users taking actions to fetch or explore the relevant information they are looking for. Our UX allows for conversational recall with your AI, whether it is to recall a single piece of fact or explore a memory chunk of related memories.
Recall for All — intuitive recall to solve a problem all humans have — forgetting. Our UX allows for predictive recall to help brainstorm and generate content. It enhances teamwork and productivity through leveraging different user’s AIs to collaborate on a project. The app also enables time travel, setting your AI to a historical date to think like you would at that moment in time.
Designing for multiple use cases accounting for past, present, and future versions of oneself has been the biggest design challenge to date. But with our team, technology, and creative vision, we’re on track to build a unique AI experience for our users.
The Future is Ambient
As digital devices become omnipresent in our daily lives, we are at a time uniquely suited for humans to benefit from the individualized experiences these devices create — often without explicit actions from us.
Ambient computing combines hardware and software to create a seamless user experience that integrates into the flow of life. Ambient experiences are different from hardware and devices because we no longer have to take conscious actions to use them. Ambient computing uses different environmental cues like gestures, motion detection, location information, and speech recognition to initiate different user experiences.
Over the past few years, companies have moved to integrate computers into our daily lives to the point where we don’t notice we are using them at all. Google has created predictions in Gmail and Docs. Smart speakers are programmed to respond to simple wake words. Smart home technology like Ring doorbells, motion-sensing lights, and refrigerators that tell you when you need to buy groceries are growing in popularity worldwide.
“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” –Steve Jobs
We are creating an ambient AI for individuals that can solve monumental challenges and improve many people's quality of life.
The Potential Impact
Everyone deserves to remember the things they value.
Today we are focusing on easing retention anxiety and enhancing the performance of people in everyday life. As our technology progresses, we will help people who are focused on improving their well-being and mitigating memory loss that comes with aging.
I wake up every day with a purpose knowing the potential impact of our product at personal.ai. I look forward to the day we will expand our technology to the 50 million people who have dementia worldwide¹.
If you haven’t read it, check out the first article in the series by Dr. Marc Ettlinger discussing the science of remembering and the second article by Sharon Zhang exploring technological versions of human memory. In the fourth and final article to follow, founder Suman Kanuganti will wrap up the series with an entrepreneurial view on creating a business that safekeeps an individual's thoughts and memories that define them with a Personal AI that Never Forgets.
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