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Inluu - A Secret Startup That Lets People Chat With You When You Aren’t Around.
By Rob | May 11, 2007
Inluu has been in super secret mode for many months now, but several recent posts on the Inluu blog have revealed the core idea of the project. Inluu stands for “in lieu of you.” The site uses a “human proxy engine” to learn about you and build a map of your memories. Here is a description that was recently disclosed on the blog.
When you first come to inluu.com and decide to train your own inluu, you’ll be asked to introduce yourself. You type your response using natural language, in your own words. Perhaps you’ll say something like:“My name is Juan Irming and I live in Seattle. I was born in Spain and raised in Sweden. I’m married to Dana and we have a son, Max.”
Behind the scenes, a data tree mirroring your train of thought and memories is now created. Next, inluu will ask you about the relevant topics you mentioned. In the above case, the training tool would drill down and ask you about subjects like Seattle, Dana and Max. And so it goes on, building a hierarchy of your memories, keeping topics connected to each other the same way they’re linked in your mind.
The more you share, the more questions inluu will have for you. The training process can go on forever; it’s up to you. You can spend hours in one session answering questions, or just ten minutes answering a couple, then return a week later. You can build your inluu in one sitting or slowly over time. It’s all up to you.
So what happens once your Innlu is built up? People can come chat with it. It basically becomes a chat bot with your personality. People can ask it questions and it can respond much as you would.
My initial thought was “what a dumb idea.” But I want to retract that. I see two promising uses for Innlu. First, the technology is probably pretty complex and cool, and could have other uses, so this startup could be acquired for their algorithms, even if they can’t monetize the original idea.
Second, it would be a great way to “pre-meet” people. Say you have a job interview, a meeting with a client, or something similar. Chat with their Inluu and learn some basics about them before your meeting. Sales people would use it. Companies could use it to screen job applicants (chat with their Inluus)… it opens up a whole can of legal worms way beyond anything we’ve seen from blogs and social networking sites.
We don’t have enough information about the company to give it an outside the valley score, but the founders seem to be hardcore computer science types, and being based in Seattle, money should be relatively easy to come by for this type of idea.
May 11th, 2007 at 4:39 pm
It will be interesting to see how it will work when they actually launch. The potential value that you point out is valid, but it’s difficult to say how good it really is without seeing it in action. The A.I. systems I’ve seen in the past have had an incredibly mechanical, awkward feel to them. I think that Inlulu’s success hinges on their ability to make interactions on the site feel natural.
And for the pre-meet value to be realized, people would either need to be honest when ‘training’ their Inlulu personality or a pretty sophisticated set questions and algorithms would be required to catch inconsistencies.
Seems like a lot of “if” scenarios, but the game breaking possibilities are huge with this one.
May 11th, 2007 at 10:09 pm
[…] Outside the Valley today made an interesting post about us. I’d like to thank them for the mention as […]
May 12th, 2007 at 9:22 pm
[…] Inluu already have received press coverage by Brier Dudley of the Seattle Times, John Cook of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Outside the Valley. […]