Meet Mate, your AI BFF who is much friendlier than Siri

Photo credit: yarruta / 123RF.

I can’t complain about my search engine of choice. I use it to look up things like startups and half-forgotten song lyrics. In turn, my online search spits ad money-driven results back out at me. Such is business.

But does it have to be? Mate, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup, thinks that my search portal and I could have something more, hence the name. Mate’s founders Rahul Vishwakarma and Kailash Ahirwar ask, why have a strictly business relationship with your search engine, when it can be your friend?

Why have a strictly business relationship with your search engine, when it can be your friend?

Interaction with Mate takes place over a chat, a bit like if you were having a Whatsapp conversation with Siri. Unlike Siri, the chat is designed to be more conversational, replacing Siri’s robotic manner and wry sense of humor with something a little more warm and fuzzy. Like Vue.ai (or any ecommerce site that uses your past search data to show you similar items you might be interested in), it learns your preferences to better predict what you want. Like vPhrase, it can extract trends out of large sets of data.

Mate’s founders want to get even more personal with searches, though. That’s why they’re working on an algorithm that can detect users’ emotions and then apply that data to their search results. It’s a delicate process, considering what happened when Microsoft attempted to make a friendly AI bot.

A Mate prototype will be released sometime in the next month. Once it’s released, Mate’s developer kit will be free of charge. Rahul says that Mate will always be free for users, but charges for developers may be released in the future.

More than a search engine

Photo credit: Ravi Shah.

Mate emerged from Rahul and Kailash’s university days at Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology – almost four years ago – when they were having trouble getting search engines to lead them to what they were looking for. “In that ocean of data, you need to find a needle,” Rahul explains. Both founders studied engineering. In a couple of years, they built their first model and began testing. They officially registered Mate last month.

Working with Mate is a little like getting to know a new friend. The great relationship doesn’t come packaged – it’s built. In order to let Mate get to know you, you have to show it the kind of content you’re looking for.

Everyone wants to use machine learning… people don’t understand how to actually do it.

The founders give me a demonstration, in which they train Mate to become an image recognition system for dog breeds. After uploading several images of dogs with the breeds named, they’re able to input a new picture. Mate identifies it correctly. I watched a sped-up version, but the whole process takes about three hours in real time.

Many machine learning bots require people to know how to code, says Rahul. Mate’s goal is to complete the same types of tasks without a user having to know a single line of code.

A piece of your imagination