Preparing for publishing

Here at Finwe Ltd. good news keep coming in: we have successfully completed our internal test round for our first AI app (which will be called "Call AI"), and final graphics and marketing material for it are nearly finished. So everything's going forward smoothly and we are preparing for publishing Call AI within a few days via Google Play!

As a teaser, here's a preview of our logo and a few words about what Call AI is all about:

For a long time, communication with other people via calls and messages has been the primary use case for mobile phones. Hence, all phone models provide some kind of phone book application for managing and accessing contacts; some modern ones also have a widget for pinning a few selected contacts directly to home screen. It is also quite common to look for frequently used contacts from the recent calls list. Plus, there's a plethora of 3rd party apps for doing the same thing with different user interface variations.

Is there anything wrong with current situation? Yes, there is. Alphabetical phone book is painfully slow to browse. Static home screen widgets provide fast access, but do not adapt to temporal usage where different contacts come and go. Recent calls list supports well temporal usage, but users can't remember whether a certain contact can be (still) found from the recent calls list, so this is often a dead end and requires another look from the phone book application.

You might ask, can there be any better way? Certainly! Some phone books allow pinning selected contacts in the top part, some widgets include recent calls list -like functionality and adapt contacts based on usage. But there's still something that other solutions seem to have missed. That, my friend, is location. 

For years, our scientist have participated in international research projects, and collected and analyzed months of call data from dozens of users. One important finding is that when people initiate communication, there is a significant connection between user's current location and the target person. It is not surprising if you think about it. When you go to the office, you'll make calls to your colleagues and clients, perhaps to your spouse. When you're at home, you communicate with your family and friends. And so on. That's why static widget won't work, and not even a recent activity based. You need to handle location as well.

Another problem in many apps aimed for increasing productivity is that they require so much learning and configuring that more time and effort is wasted than gained. Also applies here: you don't want to spend time managing contacts, you want to use it for communicating with them. A tool that really helps need to learn by itself, automatically. No configuring.

Now we come to our first app, Call AI. It is is a new kind of contact widget, which learns your personal top contacts automatically and keeps the contacts relevant without any configuring. But the real kick is that it also learns your most important locations automatically, and keeps separate top contacts list for each relevant place. At home, you've got home contacts. At work, you've got work contacts. And so on.

Call AI uses mobile phone network cells for positioning, so you don't need to worry about battery consumption. Since all learning takes place in the phone, there is no outgoing data transfers - you're privacy is guaranteed. Moreover, we don't want to ruin an otherwise great tool with a flood of advertisements and thus have decided to make Call AI a paid application, but with very affordable price. This can be reconsidered if need arises, though.

From our user tests we have learned that it is also quite exciting to observe the learning the process. When new contacts and locations begin to appear, it's almost like magic. But the most amazing thing is the relevancy of contacts. As one of our test users put it: "This is just amazing! Whether I'm at home, work or partying, it just knows who I'd like to call. How does it do that!?"

We will post again as soon as Call AI becomes downloadable, so stay tuned. Then try it out, wait a few days and report back how it has learned YOUR locations and contacts. With your help we can fine tune the algorithms and make it even better. Also feel free to suggest improvements and new ideas for our AI app series. An exciting journey is about to begin, welcome aboard!