JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Managing your home and family is a lot like running a small business.
According to Salary.com, if a stay-at-home parent were paid for their services they’d make more than $178,000 a year and in many households, both parents work.
So is there a way to make life easier? I hired an Artificial Intelligence household assistant for less than $25 a month.
Her name is “O” and she’s there 24/7.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo is the founder of the company that made “O” and she also founded Care.com in 2006. That’s the website that revolutionized the way families find caregivers. Her newest venture, Ohai.ai, also aims to make life more manageable for busy families. O claims to get your life in order through emails and text messages.
I saw Lirio Marcelo speak at PS27′s Women’s Founder’s Day Event in Jacksonville in March and was intrigued by Ohai.ai. So after she left, we met up on Zoom.
Lirio Marcelo said Care.com solved one problem but exposed another.
“Founding that company and running that company, I found that technology wasn’t ready to solve what we call everyday care coordination. The difficulty of pickup and drop-offs, reminders, making sure you never missed anything. And, you know, the school sends these 11-page newsletters,” said Lirio Marcelo.
If you’re a parent with a kid in school you’re familiar with those weekly large doses of important school information.
“You miss things, you miss picture day, you miss early closing days, Teacher Appreciation days,” Lirio Marcelo said.
O connects with your calendar and through text or emails manages your appointments, scans emails for important dates, can coordinate kids’ pickups and drop-offs, can send out reminders, even schedule a doctor’s appointment or a massage. Right now, it’s in the Beta stage and Lirio Marcelo said 90% of the work is done by AI and 10%, like booking appointments, is what she calls “HI” or human intervention.
I asked her about her favorite feature.
“Right now, it’s going to sound so basic -- it’s that 11-page newsletter. (The app) scans all the documents, summarizes them for you and puts them in your calendar,” said Lirio Marcelo.
Artificial intelligence is helping people in every part of their lives.
There are AI Financial Assistants that will manage your money, AI Travel Assistants that can plan your itinerary, AI writing assistants and more. All of these services use an algorithm to come up with a unique solution for a question or problem.
“We’re building a service-driven, not a search-based driven tool, and it’s an algorithm that we’re building,” Lirio Marcelo said.
She explained the future is now.
“I remember, in the [Care.com] days, robots came up in terms of being able to serve, I think more and more, we’re gonna see the power of AI also being able to help in the home,” she said.
Security concerns
All of these AI services are meant to fix a problem or make your life easier. But there are always questions about keeping your private information safe. It might make you feel vulnerable.
I asked Lirio Marcelo how users can be assured that the service protects people’s information.
“We use the latest techniques around authentication when you log in, encrypting all of your information. We do not sell the data and even if in the future, if we decide that we are selling data, it would be anonymized, analytics of pursuit of interests of families. And we would do that actually to enhance the service overall,” said Lirio Marcelo.
Lirio Marcelo also explained that users have the right to delete any information they provide upon request. We went to the University of North Florida to talk with AI expert Dr. Joshua Gellers for more insight.
“I think you have to ask yourself, ‘What is the kind of information that I am comfortable sharing? and then, if it were somehow released to the broader public, I wouldn’t be harmed in any kind of way,” said Gellers.
Gellers said when using these types of services, you’re bound by the terms of service and most people don’t read them closely.
“We just accept that they’re full of legalese, and really long, and if we want to use the service, we necessarily have to accept them. But it’s because we keep engaging in that behavior, that it allows companies to continuously do that and write those very long-winded agreements that we don’t really look over with a fine tooth comb. I think it’s really going to be to our detriment, if we don’t send a signal back to the private sector, that we do want to have more information about how our data is going to be used, and by whom, and to what ends,” said Gellers.
America is often referred to as having a culture of convenience and that comes at a price and what concerns Gellers more is he believes the United States is behind the ball when it comes to regulating AI.
“There’s a draft AI Bill of Rights at the federal level. At the state level, we’re starting to see little pockets of AI-based legislation, but it’s very slow going and the technology is increasing much faster than our regulatory mechanisms are capable of addressing,” said Gellers.
Until or even if that happens it’s always up to the user to be thoughtful about the shared information, understanding that it’s more important than ever to always read the fine print.