Fin Trying to Build a Digital Assistant Consumers Can Trust
*By Madison Alworth*
If you're too busy running the usual errands this week and need help buying flowers and booking brunch reservations for Mother's Day, Fin wants to help. The artificial intelligence-enabled personal assistant uses machine learning and human know-how to accomplish tasks for you ー or your mom ー and will do so without a subscription for a limited time.
"Assistance is great, but it has to work, " said Sam Lessin, a co-founder of Fin. "It especially has to work in the real world, because as you know if you send someone to the wrong meeting or book the wrong plane flight, that's a lot worse than playing the wrong song on your Alexa at home."
Lessin, who sold his file sharing start-up Drop.io to Facebook in 2010, started Fin with Andrew Kortina, the co-founder of Venmo. They began tinkering in 2015 with the idea of a time-saving way to make the internet more useful, [according to TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/22/fin-assistant/).
It was a competitive gambit in an already crowded realm of A.I.-enabled devices and smart-home products made by big players ー Amazon's Echo, Google's Home assistant, and Siri and HomePod by Apple.
Lessin wants Fin to do more than just tell you the weather. He said he wants his service to replace personal assistants with A.I. and a team of at-the-ready humans to execute essential tasks like buying airline tickets, booking meetings, and ordering gifts for mom. It’s tech, he said, that lets you outsource tasks to people for about $1 a minute.
The service usually requires a subscription, but Fin is offering a limited-time promotion around Mother’s Day to bring in new customers who will become subscribers.
When asked how they are hoping to capture that audience, Lessin said that Fin has to prove its reliability, consistently.
“It has to be repeated success,” he said. “You trust an A.I. platform and you trust any type of assistance platform because you have great experiences with it over time, and people you know have great experiences with it over time.”
For full interview, [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/the-artificial-intelligence-assistant-that-wants-to-help-you-shop-for-mom).
Former Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers learned all about technology’s volatile highs and lows as a veteran of the internet’s early boom days during the late 1990s and the ensuing meltdown that followed the mania. And now he is seeing potential signs of the cycle repeating with another transformative technology in artificial intelligence. Chambers is trying take some of the lessons he learned while riding a wave that turned Cisco into the world's most valuable company in 2000 before a crash hammered its stock price and apply them as an investor in AI startups. He recently discussed AI's promise and perils during an interview with The Associated Press.
Tesla reported a surprise increase in sales in the third quarter as the electric car maker likely benefited from a rush by consumers to take advantage of a $7,500 credit before it expired on Sept. 30. The company reported Thursday that sales in the three months through September rose 7% compared to the same period a year ago. The gain follows two quarters of steep declines as people turned off by CEO Elon Musk’s foray into right-wing politics avoided buying his company’s cars and even protested at some dealerships. Sales rose to 497,099 vehicles, compared with 462,890 in the same period last year.
OpenAI could now be the world’s most valuable startup, ahead of Elon Musk’s SpaceX and TikTok parent company ByteDance, after a secondary stock sale designed to retain employees at the ChatGPT maker. Current and former OpenAI employees sold $6.6 billion in shares to a group of investors, pushing the privately held artificial intelligence company’s valuation to $500 billion, according to a source with knowledge of the deal who was not authorized to discuss it publicly. The valuation reflects high expectations for the future of AI technology and continues OpenAI’s remarkable trajectory from its start as a nonprofit research lab in 2015.
Tom’s Guide Editor-in-Chief Mark Spoonauer breaks down Apple & Amazon's latest product drops—what's hot, what's hype, and what really matters for users.
Police in Northern California pulled over a self-driving Waymo taxi after it made an illegal U-turn. But without a driver behind the wheel, they could not issue a moving violation ticket.
With satellites already in orbit, defense contractor L3Harris is standing by to accelerate Trump's executive order. We take an inside look at the technology
Electronic Arts, the video game maker of “Madden NFL,” “The Sims,” and other popular titles, is being acquired and taken private for about $52.5 billion in what could become the largest-ever buyout funded by private-equity firms.
YouTube will offer creators a way to rejoin the streaming platform if they were banned for violating COVID-19 and election misinformation policies that are no longer in effect.
