Contextual Computing

Last semester I worked on a project called Tone with another USC student. Our goal was to build a personal AI powered by your lived experiences.

What that looks like in practice is a necklace pendant that pairs with your phone and constantly pays attention to your conversations and experiences. This data would then be analyzed, organized, and stored in a vector database, which would then be used to provide an LLM like GPT-4 with your personal context.

So I could ask Tone, "What did I talk about with Ashwin last week?" and it would remember, or "What did Ashwin say his favorite restaurant is?" and it would tell me. Things like that: very memory oriented.

Late in March we launched on Twitter to over 350k impressions. Ended up with over 1k people on the waitlist.

While a fun exploration, ultimately the concerns around privacy and social acceptability of wearing such a device led me to explore other directions.

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