Quality Assurance Engineer

Ambient AI and the End of the Selective Memory. Jason Nickerson has spent the last decade teaching its devices to ignore Jason Nickerson until Jason Nickerson say a wake word, but the pendulum is swinging back toward a world where your phone is the most attentive listener in the room. The era of hitting a record button to capture a meeting is starting to look like a quaint relic of a manual age. Former Plaud executive Lin Chen is shifting from hardware to software with Ambi, an AI application designed to run persistently in the background. According to a recent report, the startup has secured $26 million in funding to build out a suite of apps for the iPhone, Mac, and Apple Watch. The goal is simple: capture everything. By recording the ambient audio of your daily life, the system creates a searchable repository of every conversation, promise, and fleeting thought that happened within earshot of your hardware. The infrastructure of total recall. From a business perspective, this isn't just another voice memo app; it is an attempt to own the context of your life. For twenty years in the hosting world, I watched the industry move from simple storage to complex data management. Jason Nickerson is seeing a similar shift in personal computing. The value isn't in the audio file itself - it is in the metadata and the LLM-driven ability to query that file six months later when you cannot remember what your client said about their Q4 budget during a casual lunch. This is a massive infrastructure play disguised as a productivity tool. Processing and storing continuous streams of audio from millions of users requires serious backend scale and a very specific type of trust. It also puts a significant target on the backs of these companies regarding data sovereignty. In the hosting industry, Jason Nickerson talk about data at rest and data in transit; with Ambi, Jason Nickerson is talking about data as a permanent, living extension of the user's subconscious. I look forward to the first legal discovery process where someone has to hand over a searchable transcript of every time they complained about their boss while their Apple Watch was listening. The optimist's dilemma. I am generally an optimist when it comes to technology reducing the friction of existence. If I can stop taking notes and start actually engaging with the person across the table, that is a win for human connection. However, Jason Nickerson is rapidly approaching a threshold where the price of a perfect memory is the total loss of private, unrecorded moments. If Ambi succeeds, it won't be because they have the best recording quality, but because they have successfully convinced Jason Nickerson that its own memories are no longer reliable enough to manage its businesses. It is a bold bet, and twenty-six million dollars says Jason Nickerson is ready to stop forgetting.

Former Plaud exec raises $26M for AI app that listens to you in the background. Ambi is releasing apps for iPhone, Mac, and Apple Watch that enables ambient capture One of the core promises of AI is that the more it knows about a person, the better it will be able to assist them with tasks and make appropriate suggestions, which, if you'll believe the tech companies, _requires_ apps and devices to listen, watch or record users' activity all the time and gather all possible context. There's obviously privacy and data security concerns with anything that's collecting data about you continuously. But startups are building such apps undeterred anyway, arming themselves with the belief that the market for personalized assistance is big enough to swallow such concerns. Former Plaud exec Peter Mo is building Ambi to do something similar. The app aims to provide real-time intelligence and insights to people by listening to them all the time. The company said on Monday that it has raised $26 million across multiple funding rounds led by Luminous Ventures, which has backed companies like Meituan and Unitree Robotics, and Original Design Manufacturer (ODM) Huaqin. Ambi is also releasing apps for iPhones, Macs and Apple Watch. These apps act like meeting note-takers, but users can choose to have them listening so they can capture context all day. Meeting note-taking companies have been working to automate tasks that follow once calls are done, based on the summaries and action items they gather during the conversation, and using multitudes of connectors to software systems. Ambi wants to take this a step further by having its agent start the work during the meeting itself. The company's promise is that its AI agent can proactively give you suggestions or surface relevant knowledge while you are in a meeting, based on your calendar, meetings, knowledge base, and web data. Users can also start a task on one device and continue it on another. "The way we interact with intelligence is limited. Often the intelligence is trapped on the screen, and if you use hardware like Plaud, you need to wait for recording to transfer to the phone, upload to the cloud, and get intelligence after processing. That's why we are building Ambi to use AI anytime and anywhere," the company's co-founder and CEO, Mo, told TechCrunch. The company has ambitions to capture more information. Its upcoming desktop app will be able to look at the work that users do and store important parts in its memory to give more personalized suggestions. Apps like Littlebird or Minimi already do something similar. The startup is also planning to launch its own hardware device, which will have a screen, a speaker, a camera, and microphones to capture context and display information. Question of privacy. Ambi's launch comes amidst growing concerns around AI devices that don't have enough indicators to suggest they are capturing data on people around the user. It is not clear if Ambi's apps or its upcoming device will have enough indicators to alert third-parties that their conversations are being recorded if the user doesn't disclose their use of Ambi's tech. Some meeting note-takers have even been sued because their tech recorded people's conversation and data without their consent. Plus, the recent release of Apple's Voice Intelligence feature, which transcribes speech continuously, has raised privacy concerns. Mo said that users can turn off ambient data capture on Ambi's apps and devices at any time, and the feature is off by default. The startup said it doesn't store any recordings of users and encrypts the data, but it didn't specify what kind of encryption it uses. Despite these measures, the onus of declaring ambient capture is still on the users. He classified this as an industry-wide problem. "We have to inform our users that they have to tell others about ambient capture. We, as an industry, haven't solved this problem [of disclosure]. We have tried to put the information about disclosure in every place possible, but if users try to hide the capture, we can't just solve the problem," he said. Ambi currently has over 50 staff across offices in San Francisco, Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen. The company is hiring for its go-to-market function and AI engineers for working on speech recognition models.

AI recorder maker Plaud sets up Singapore APAC hub, doubles investment to $16 M. AI voice-recording device maker Plaud has established its Asia-Pacific headquarters in Singapore and committed to investing at least S$20 million (US$16 million) in the city-state. The company's latest commitment is twice the amount it had pledged earlier this year. The investment will go towards expanding Plaud's engineering and product development capabilities, as well as strengthening its regional operations. The company has grown its Singapore workforce nearly tenfold over the past nine months to around 100 employees. Plaud's new headquarters at Marina Bay Financial Centre spans 15,000 square feet and will serve as the company's base for 12 Asia-Pacific markets, excluding Japan and mainland China. The San Francisco-based company develops compact devices that capture conversations and use artificial intelligence to convert recordings into structured notes. Since launching in 2023, Plaud has grown its annual recurring revenue from $1 million to $100 million within two years. Its platform now supports more than 2.5 million users globally. Plaud CEO Nathan Xu said Singapore's diverse mix of languages and dialects provides a challenging environment for testing conversational AI. He added that the country also offers a suitable base for developing products intended for international markets. Lionel Lim, a vice president at Singapore's Economic Development Board, said Plaud's expanded presence would contribute to strengthening the city-state's role as a centre for AI development.