Tempo AI, makers of an artificial intelligence-powered productivity iPhone app, has expanded to Hong Kong. Since Li Ka-Shing’s Horizons Ventures was one of their early investors (they took part in Tempo AI’s seed and series A round), Hong Kong and it’s English-speaking population along with it’s business-focused mentality seemed like the perfect choice.
The Menlo Park-based company has been collaborating with prestigious R&D outfit SRI International (the lab behind Siri) to inject years of AI research and semantic tech into Tempo Smart Calendar – which is focused on improving the daily workflow for business professionals. A few cool features include auto-dialing into conference calls and checking flight statuses – without having to even launch the app.
We interviewed Raj Singh, CEO of Tempo AI, and he told StartupsHK about Smart Calendar and how it’s different from other intelligent personal assistants such as the widely-used Google Now.
“Google Now is super horizontal, it will suggest everything from restaurants, from places of interest to weather. We’re really focused on business workflows,” said Raj. “It’s much more meeting-focused around a business professional workflow so it’s like a vertical assistant built on top of your calendar.”
Raj also stresses that unlike Google-centric products such as Now, Keep and Maps – Smart Calendar is very agnostic as it plays nice with all of your other apps, intelligently drawing data from other applications and social networks that you use in order to get to know you better.
In fact, one of the coolest features that Smart Calendar boasts is Insights – which generates a profile on the person or company you’re heading to meet. By simply drawing data from apps and sites such as Gmail, Facebook posts, tweets, AngelList and CrunchBase profiles, the Insights feature could be exceptionally useful when meeting someone for the first time.
As we move into a future where we’re largely reliant on our machines, Raj says that Assistant and AI is the new layer that’s going across all new apps. “Web 3.0 is the anticipatory web – you have all these wearables, sensors and data that tries to predict what’s important to you,” says Raj. “A calendar is a really important data source because it’s an expression of intent: it says what you’re going to do, where you’re going and how you’re going to spend your time.”
Raj Singh on Startbase.HK: Raj Singh
Tempo AI on Startbase.HK: Tempo AI
