The best, and only, personal assistant I’ve ever had was Clara. She studied my schedule closer than I did, knew hours I liked keeping free from calls, and referred all meetings to my favorite local coffee shop. I’d just CC her on any email, and she’d take care of the rest.
Clara, of course, wasn’t real. She was built by the startup Clara Labs, using a cross of AI and real people to handle scheduling for me. Now, Clara is growing up. The company has recently secured a Series A round of funding worth $7.3 million, with contributions from ex-Dropbox investor Lan Xuezhao’s Basis Set Ventures, Sequoia, First Round, and, perhaps most interestingly, Slack.
When I last tried Clara, she was mostly people who were hired to respond to emails and schedule. This work was never intended to be waste. Instead, Clara Labs was gathering data to train its own machine to have one perfect conversation that might play out a million different ways: scheduling a meeting.
Since, Clara has continued to get smarter, first suggesting responses to human emailers, and now, I’m told, manages to take most of those conversations over herself. While Nelson wouldn’t commit to a percentage of responses handled by Clara, she says that people are only flagged in when Clara doesn’t have a high certainty of offering a perfect response.
“If you think about the challenges of machine learning, the fundamental challenge is you can’t ship something to the user that doesn’t work reliably. You need to protect the user from the mispredictions, or the low confidence cases. These systems are in their infancy,” says Nelson. “We want people to understand what it is to have a hybrid system, and many systems work like this. With pilots, most of the time in the air, the plane itself is flying you. But the pilot is there just in case.”
“Clara is on both sides of calendars and makes instantaneous, magical things happen,” says Nelson of this new model–even if that model is, at some points, as much of an illusion of AI automation as it is true code magic.