I would love to finally see some progress here. Worked on something similar 20+ years ago and got so burned out by the process and huge amount of capital needed.
“ Solgene Therapeutics' patented drug-delivery technology enables the encapsulation, in a porous ceramic material, of living cells that secrete therapeutic compounds. After implantation, the material shields the encapsulated cells from the host's immune system while allowing passage of nutrients and therapeutic cell-secreted compounds. Implanted cells continue to function, thus mimicking natural processes. Solgene believes it can create competitive advantages in under-served biotech markets. It seeks revenues through alliances to commercialize hard-to-deliver, cell-secreted, large-molecule therapies. Solgene proved its concept by overcoming diabetes in diabetic mice. Target applications include delivery of livestock therapies, growth factors for bone healing, and a cell-secreted HIV therapy.”
This sounded cool until, "Now Goel is forming a business to bring the chatbot to the wider world of education.” // are all educators just trying to create companies these days?
1. A number of early customers we've spoken with don't like the idea of an always listening device. The perception is an invasion of privacy.
2. There's a fear that someone outside the home could simply yell a command like "unlock the doors" to gain access. There are a number of ways one could solve this, but it's a fear we've heard about.
So the extra friction of taking out your phone and pressing a button so far seems worth the added layer of privacy and security, but we're definitely thinking hard about this one.
Thanks! I am honestly amazed so many people were able to get to that page. We plan on going live with the website next week and right now it takes a fair bit of digging around to get there. That said, it is technically "public" facing so I'm fixing it up as soon as Stripe permits. Will probably disable the button in the meantime if you go back.
Gender: we have a variety of systems set up and we try to give them each a unique personality. My home, for example, is a male named Theodore with a British accent. The LA office is Scarlett and the Denver office is Samantha.
Website: we have a new website launching soon with a lot more information. You stumbled upon a page I hope to finish building today. Sorry for the confusion.
"Voice programming": We chose to focus on getting a product to market and proving customer demand before building out the entire developer portal. It's definitely the plan and we want to do it, it's just not where we see early revenue coming from and as a small team we have to pick our battles. I can't wait to open this stuff up when ready.
All good points. With Josh, we're targeting large homes with complex environments. Our goal is to make it super simple to set up, configure, and use Josh. While Echo + IFTTT + a Wink hub might not sound too complicated to someone on HN, it's far too hacky for a 10,000 sq ft home where the average home owner doesn't want to understand what's truly going on.
We're also focused as much on home monitoring and access when you're away from the home as we are on control from within. It might seem subtle, but the number of times you want eyes and ears and the ability to change the environment of your home when away is super important.
The longer term play which will take some time to realize is all about AI. We see Josh as an invisible companion that grows with you, understands natural language, and can interact with the connected devices around you.
We're very much an AI company, and that's the focus, but the product will roll out in stages. The foundation is built on a home-made NLP engine that's pretty flexible. That said, NNs are only used for speech recognition currently. With a relatively stable NLP engine we're focused now on device integration to control the majority of IoT products our customers might have. We're implementing some learning and pattern recognition models but it will take some time before those come close to resembling any true "intelligence".
https://www.inknowvation.com/sbir/companies/solgene-therapeu...
“ Solgene Therapeutics' patented drug-delivery technology enables the encapsulation, in a porous ceramic material, of living cells that secrete therapeutic compounds. After implantation, the material shields the encapsulated cells from the host's immune system while allowing passage of nutrients and therapeutic cell-secreted compounds. Implanted cells continue to function, thus mimicking natural processes. Solgene believes it can create competitive advantages in under-served biotech markets. It seeks revenues through alliances to commercialize hard-to-deliver, cell-secreted, large-molecule therapies. Solgene proved its concept by overcoming diabetes in diabetic mice. Target applications include delivery of livestock therapies, growth factors for bone healing, and a cell-secreted HIV therapy.”