Sometimes all you want to know is which restaurant it was your friend went to a few months ago that had some great sushi. Except the photos are way too low on their Instagram profile to scroll all the way through, and they canĄ¯t really remember when you ask them. It's a real pain in the butt.
Well, thatĄ¯s the kind of questions Molly hopes to answer with its new personalised bot. The startup wants to make all the information we make readily available on our social media profiles easy for our friends to access.
Molly founders Chris Messina, Esther Crawford and Ethan Sutin
Founded by Chris Messina, Esther Crawford, and Ethan Sutin, the app aims to cross-pollinate from your various online profiles and gather all the data into one location. Not just that, Molly also wants to make the information searchable via a chatbot and, eventually, digital assistants like Alexa. What would that do?
Well, for instance, you could ask the app to suggest a restaurant that you and a friend havenĄ¯t been to but are likely to enjoy. Molly would then comb through both your datasets to find a place neither of you have eaten at but fits the kind of restaurants you normally prefer. Though you could technically do that manually, the app would take all the hassle of decision-making and planning out of the equation, so you could instead both just show up for the meet and have fun.
Reuters
Right now Molly is still being developed, as it has to train to interact in natural language of course. However, the founders believe the finished version may be only a couple of years away. In the meantime, theyĄ¯ve launched a question feature with the app, where you can ask Molly about a someoneĄ¯s preferences of food, music, etc, based on their social media.
ItĄ¯s only with featured profiles at the moment, though anyone can ask the questions. And if Molly canĄ¯t answer, the question is sent to the app so the person the bot is modelled on can reply themselves, teaching the bot in the process.
The best part is that Molly isn't just restricted to information about you, she can also pull up advice you may have given, or information about a new business venture you're working on. As long as someone has already asked that question, you'll never have to type the same reply twice, because the chatbot can just find that old tweet, comment, or blog post, and use that as your ready response.
The plan is to eventually open up profiles so anyone can have a bot catalogue and answer questions for them when friends ask. And donĄ¯t worry about the privacy issues, you can also set up security so only people youĄ¯ve approved (one-time approval) can quiz your bot.