Augment AI Assistant

Almost every digital product today, regardless what it is, needs to be called upon, even user facing AI assistants such as Cortana, or Siri, and alike, must be called upon, with either pressing a key or voice, and most of them not really assisting with helping people live better lives in the age of information overload and overstimulation of our daily life with more information we process on a regular basis then ever before.

Augment solves both, an AI assistant that helps people remember anything that crosses their screens, keeps track of all meetings, transcribes them, extracts vital information, manages all related documents, conversations, and files relative to each specific meeting, and the best part of it all, it’s invisible.

Through research, we discovered people with meeting heavy lives of back-to-back meetings, with major pain points of not being prepared for meetings, distracted while note-taking, etc. we started noticing an interesting pattern, people using different productivity apps, and note-taking strategies, have a constant cognitive overload of the open tabs, apps, and overlay screens, whether you need them there or not, so we decided to go deeper in our discovery and learn about peoples relationship and behavior with technology, how their daily lives intersect with technology they use, and what we discovered was an eye opening reality of people having a hate-love relationship with most of their organizations and/or productivity tools/apps/assistants that were constantly in their faces, and if they hide the icon of an app that was there to help with something, they would forget the tool even existed, which, leads to the tool not delivering on its promise, user disappointment of the tool and distrust of many others like it.

This lead us to design Augment to be invisible and contextual. Augment will never persist to be in font of users eyes at all times, it will only appear where and when you need it most, in context, ready to deliver information you need to be prepared for your next meeting, automatically transcribe your meetings, appear when you need to find or recall anything.

When we set-out to design the public release version of Augment, we first as described above dove deep into research to understand the pain points and needs of people and see what kind of opportunities we may discover and solve, then we spent months building mental maps, wireframes and prototypes of the potential consumer facing product, regularly testing and iterating on the product, designing UI’s and testing every step of the way to make sure we are truly solving the problems we have discovered and addressing them in such a way that is un-intrusive, contextual, and helpful.

The impact of our preliminary beta release was staggering! The first magical moment for our users was the fact that Augment is un-intrusive, subtle, yet always there when they actually need it, and becomes invisible when they don’t, our users can finally be fully present and engaged in their meetings without having to worry about taking notes.