In the U.S., figuring out ways to pay for health insurance is a perennial problem -- not just for individuals, but for the businesses employing them. Under the Affordable Care Act, businesses with 50 or more full-time employees must offer health coverage to 95% of their staff -- or face penalties.

Yuzu wants to make health plans cheaper by letting insurers mix and match benefits

'Do not go to law school': This fund manager warns the legal field is in 'big trouble' as folks use ChatGPT for complex contracts. Is it time to consider the trades? The legal services industry is in “big trouble” — at least that’s what fund manager Geoff Lewis believes.

'Do not go to law school': This fund manager warns the legal field is in 'big trouble' as folks use ChatGPT for complex contracts. Is it time to consider the trades?

Joshua Browder, CEO of DoNotPay – a startup that has developed a so-called "robot lawyer" to automatically help consumers do things like contest parking tickets by using AI to draft emails or official complaints – said factual errors will make some ...

If you're cautious about using ML and bots at work, that's not a bad idea

DoNotPay is an AI-powered chatbot that simplifies the process of handling various legal issues, including consumer rights, parking tickets, and small claims disputes. With its easy-to-use interface, DoNotPay offers automated legal advice, assistance in ...

7 “Best” AI Legal Assistants (October 2023)

'Do not go to law school': This fund manager warns the legal field is in 'big trouble' — as folks use ChatGPT for complex contracts. Is it time to get into the trades? The legal services industry is in “big trouble” — at least that’s what fund manager Geoff Lewis believes.

'Do not go to law school': This fund manager warns the legal field is in 'big trouble' — as folks use ChatGPT for complex contracts. Is it time to get into the trades?

In fact, an online service has already managed to automate several tasks that would traditionally be done by lawyers. DoNotPay helps users contest parking tickets, report tax fraud and a wide range of other services — all powered by AI. The service costs ...

Fund manager: the legal field is in 'big trouble'

One particularly impactful application of AI is in the world of small scale construction firms, where the AI tool "DoNotPay" is leveling the playing field and empowering these businesses in ways ...

Empowering Small Scale Construction Firms: How AI Tool DoNotPay Reshapes the Industry

Thankfully, the app DoNotPay has launched a new feature called Free Trial Surfing that purports to take some of the pain out of subscriptions. Specifically, around the free trial periods of ...

This brilliant app cancels your subscriptions for you before the free trials end

If saving money is hard for you these days, you aren’t alone. The personal savings rate—a measure of the percentage of disposable income Americans save—was 4.3% in June 202 3, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Many obstacles can make it ...

The Smartest (and Riskiest) Ways to Save in 2023

DoNotPay demonstrates that there are still areas in the customer experience that remain protracted and painful. Phone trees can be circuitous, FI chatbots clueless, and calls with live agents ...

ALL YOUR BOTS ARE BELONG TO US: DONOTPAY’S CHATBOT INTERACTION WITH WELLS FARGO

DoNotPay

donotpay

'Multimodal is the most unappreciated AI breakthrough' says DoNotPay CEO Joshua Browder

DoNotPayCEO জোশুয়া ব্রাউডার বলেছেন 'মাল্টিমোডাল হল সবচেয়ে অপ্রশংসিত এআই ব্রেকথ্রু'

„Multimodal ist der am wenigsten gewürdigte KI-Durchbruch“, sagt DoNotPayCEO Joshua Browder

"El multimodal es el avance de la IA menos apreciado", dice el director ejecutivo de DoNotPay, Joshua Browder

« Le multimodal est la percée la plus méconnue de l'IA », déclare Joshua Browder, PDG de DoNotPay

DoNotPay के सीईओ जोशुआ ब्राउडर कहते हैं, 'मल्टीमॉडल सबसे कम सराहना प्राप्त AI सफलता है'

「マルチモーダルは最も評価されていないAIのブレークスルーだ」とDoNotPayのCEOジョシュア・ブラウダー氏は語る

DoNotPayCEO Joshua Browder는 '멀티모달은 가장 인정받지 못한 AI 혁신'이라고 말했습니다.

‘Multimodal é o avanço de IA menos apreciado’, diz Joshua Browder, CEO da DoNotPay

«Мультимодальные перевозки — это самый недооцененный прорыв в области искусственного интеллекта», — говорит генеральный директор DoNotPay Джошуа Браудер.

DoNotPayCEO'su Joshua Browder "Multimodal, en takdir edilmemiş yapay zeka atılımıdır" diyor

'Đa phương thức là bước đột phá về AI không được đánh giá cao nhất', Joshua Browder, CEO của DoNotPay, nói

DoNotPay 首席执行官 Joshua Browder 表示，“多模式是最未被重视的人工智能突破”

When I was browsing Twitter the other day, I came across this by Suhail, which reminded me of the famous diagram Paul Graham came up with that depicts the startup curve: tweet The diagram really resonated with my experience building in the last 9 months. More specifically, the Trough of Sorrow hit me the hardest, as I've had my fair share of lows building this project as a solo founder. One Word Domains Therefore, I thought it would be interesting to share my journey with One Word Domains so far and explore the similarities between my story and Paul's startup curve – especially given Product Hunt's last week Golden Kitty Awards (spoiler alert: One Word Domains won the Side Project category). How It All Started In the summer of 2020, I built One Word Domains out of a personal need – I was trying to come up with a decent, catchy one-word domain name for my latest side project. As a data science student, I had a ton of experience wrangling data with Python, but I haven't yet had the opportunity to build something that tackled a real-world problem. And so, later, I came up with an MVP for what was then a simple Bootstrap site that showed a list of the top 10,000 most commonly-used English words paired with startup-friendly top-level domains (TLDs) like , , , and . a week of hacking .ai .co .io .com After a moderately-successful , I decided to launch the MVP on Product Hunt a few days later just to get more feedback. Little did I know, this would be the beginning of one of the most incredible experiences of my life. soft launch on Indiehackers Product Hunt / Hacker News of Initiation My Product Hunt launch was a (relatively) huge success. One Word Domains ended up getting to , with over 700 upvotes, 90 comments, and 23 positive reviews. I was aiming for a top 5 finish, so this was way beyond my expectations. #2 Product of The Day A week later, a Hacker News user that went by the username " " about One Word Domains, and for some reason, it made its way to the front page, bringing in over 8,000 users in a single day: madhukarah posted The month following One Word Domains' launch was a whirlwind. The site received a ton of from various news sites, and I had the opportunity to go on a couple of to talk about my journey – which in turn brought in more visitors. I even received partnership and acquisition offers from some of the top registrars in the world. press podcasts Everything seemed to be going well, and I was set to turn this side project into a sustainable business that I could run after graduation. Trough of Sorrow Now I am no stranger to attention before – when I was in high school, I published a science-fiction novel that sold over 1.5K copies nationwide and went on to win various and awards, accruing over (YouTube for books) along the way. international national 850K reads on Wattpad What I wasn't used to though, was the anxiety that creeps up on you when the novelty of your "hot new product" starts to wear off. This hit me a little over 3 months into my journey with One Word Domains. Growth began to slow, there weren't as many press mentions, and my newsletters weren't getting as many responses as they did before. I was reminded of one of the myths about product-market fit that was mentioned by Ben Horowitz in his 2010 – " " As the initial hype started to die down, I began to doubt the product-market fit that I thought One Word Domains had found. piece once you achieve product market fit, you can’t lose it. Releases of Improvement Despite the feeling of unease, I kept working on One Word Domains, spending countless hours building out new features from scratch. Here are some of the features that I shipped in the last 9 months: : In response to my users' requests, I added support for over 70 different TLDs, ranging from popular ones like and to country specific ones like and . You can refer to the full list of TLDs . Support for 70+ TLDs .SO .FYI .CO.UK .DE here : By leveraging server-side lazy-loading and the scalability of PostgreSQL, I was able to improve load speeds by over 80% – which was crucial as the number of domains in the database increased to over 700,000. Improved Load Speeds : By leveraging the SpaCy and NLTK natural language libraries, I was able to to help users navigate the 700,000+ domains on the site more efficiently. Search Functionality build a search algorithm : I added features for users to save and monitor domains that they were interested in and get notified when they became available. Watchlist & Saved Domains : I built a of brandable one-word and two-word domains from marketplaces like GoDaddy and Dynadot to help users find the gems in the ocean of aftermarket domains. Aftermarket Domains centralized repository : I launched One Word Domains' in November 2020, which ended up making in the first two weeks. Affiliate Program affiliate program over $500 in affiliate revenue : And here's . The One Word Domains blog how I built it These new features led to a few occasional in traffic, but nothing overly-groundbreaking. Growth was increasing, albeit linearly. spikes Crash(es) of Ineptitude I also had my fair share of struggles along the way. For instance, I had troubles with one of my monetization strategies. I started with 3 different revenue streams – affiliate commissions, premium memberships, and paid listings – but eventually had to drop the paid listings channel as it wasn't generating enough positive results for my clients. I suspected that it was partly due the fact that paid listings literally contradicts the main premise of One Word Domains – which is to provide brandable domains that were at , not at the cost of an arm and a leg. registration price I also had various instances of unsatisfied customers who demanded a refund on their purchases. Despite feeling dejected whenever this happens, I would always honor their requests, as my philosophy is that if my product didn't provide any value to the user, I wouldn't be comfortable taking their money. While this didn't happen often, I would always treat it as a learning experience whenever it did and gather as much feedback as possible to improve the product. Migrating my entire database from raw .TXT files ( ) over to PostgreSQL was also a huge challenge. Since it was my first time learning PostgreSQL, my code would break from time to time, causing my site to crash. Fortunately, over time, my grasp of PostgreSQL improved, and I was able to mitigate these errors more effectively. I know, pretty hacky, right? Golden Kitty Awards Fast forward 9 months later. It's January of 2021, and the nominations for Product Hunt's Golden Kitty Awards were open. I decided to about it, asking my users to nominate One Word Domains if they could. While the response was quite positive, I didn't have any expecations, since I was aware that the competition was preeeetty intense. tweet However, just a few days later, I received news that One Word Domains was a Golden Kitty Nominee. I was honestly quite surprised that I made the cut, but I quickly composed myself and crafted a few emails/personalized messages to send out to my users and close friends, asking for their support. I even made a cool little popup on the site announcing the nomination: Then, the unthinkable happened. It started out with this email that I received from Product Hunt: Once again, I didn't even think that One Word Domains was going to make it to the top 4, so this news came as a pleasant surprise. I remember and thinking to myself, " " oh, this is wonderful – at least I'm set to win some cool Product Hunt swag, if not the Golden Kitty itself! However, since Product Hunt wanted to keep the mystery going, I couldn't share the news with anyone at the time, so I had no choice but to contain my excitement and wait for the day of the ceremony. Then, before I knew it, the day was here. Sitting in the green room, all I could think to myself was " " how in the world was I supposed to go up against such cool and amazing products?? For context, here's who I was going up against: (#2 Product of the Week, with 1.7K upvotes) Untools (literally the world's first robot lawyer) DoNotPay (#2 Product of the Day, super cool CSS background patterns) MagicPattern But then, just when I was about to lose faith, the craziest thing happened: I was speechless. Against all odds, One Word Domains had won the 2020 Golden Kitty Award for Best Side Project. At that very moment, all the late nights, frustrating debugging sessions, and long meetings were worth it. If you're interested, you can read the . official Product Hunt announcement here You can also watch me freak out during the award ceremony in this of the ceremony. replay The Golden Kitty Effect Once the news came out, One Word Domains received an influx of new users – 4,200 of them in 4 days, to be exact. In fact, it even got so intense that I had to to deal with the surge in traffic. upgrade my servers Search activity on the site also increased by 40%, going from 100K to over 140K in just 5 days. To put things in perspective, it took 51 days to reach 100K searches. What I've Learned While I believe there are plenty of factors that led to One Word Domains' success, I believe I can distill them down to the following 4 takeaways: Just Keep Shipping There will times when you'll feel like the initial momentum of your product is dying down. Don't fret – just keep your head down and keep building. There will be times when you'll feel like you are shouting into the void – be it when you're sending out an email blast to your mailing list or when you're tweeting about your latest feature updates. Don't sweat it – keep posting and interacting with your users. Your efforts compound over time, and trust me, people do see the effort that you're putting in, as long as you keep at it. . Consistency is key Obsess Over Your Users, Not Your Competition Instead of worrying about your competition, try building a rapport with your users. You can do this by reaching out to them with a personalized message, or by replying to their comments on Twitter. Startups that do well don't excel because they beat the competition – they do well because they provide the best user experience for their users. Treat your customers like they're your bosses – because technically speaking, they are. Nailing down the user experience will, quite literally, make or break your product Be Smart With What You Build Sometimes, it's better to use an existing product than build from scratch. It took me two whole months to get One Word Domains' affiliate program up and running because I decided to affiliate management tool – . built my own Recurrence If I had gone with an existing solution, I could've saved 2 months of precious dev time and used it to build more features for One Word Domains. I learned this the hard way. Don't be like me. If you're having a hard time making a decision, try out Baremetrics' to get some perspective. Build VS Buy calculator Rocket Ship Growth Is Overrated A few months into the project, I already knew that One Word Domains was not going to be the next unicorn. At first that made me feel a little insecure, but I eventually came to terms with it. I realized that you don't have to build the next Facebook or Uber to be happy/live a comfortable life. All you need is: A profitable business that generates a healthy amount of passive income every month A loving family Friends that you can hang out with every now and then Everything else is just icing on the cake. Instead of glorifying rocket ships and hockey stick growths, we should also normalize – or at least acknowledge that and are cool too. commercial airlines linear, healthy growth trajectories What's Next Building One Word Domains has been a wild ride so far. While I've had my ups and downs, the Golden Kitty Award definitely gives me the motivation to take this project to the next level – which I am incredibly grateful for. Moving forward, I'm planning to add the following features to the site: A machine-learning powered name creation tool that provides personalized, industry-specific name suggestions based on user input Improve the efficiency and accuracy of all background tasks that I've set up on One Word Domains' backend Add data from more domain marketplaces for the (Sedo, Dan, etc.) Aftermarket section Add support for more TLDs (.li, .id, and .studio) and new word categories (Dutch, German words) To those of you who have been here since the beginning – thank you for the continuous support, y'all are the real OGs. And to those of you who are new – welcome aboard! Thank you for taking a leap of faith – I promise to provide you with the best possible service that you deserve. Thanks for reading!

Lessons Learned Building A Golden Kitty Award-Winning Product

If you’re a millennial, you’ll know , the first-ever instant messaging bot with natural language comprehension ability. It was developed in 2000 and demonstrated exceptional wit, which most of today’s bot cannot. SmarterChild used to chat with about 2,50,000 humans every day with funny, sad, and sarcastic emotions. Today, we’ve traveled a distance with technologies like AI, ML, NLP, etc. and bots like Xiaocle have passed Turing tests of 10 minutes (i.e. users couldn’t identify that they’re talking to a bot for about 10 minutes). SmarterChild | Social Chatbot Xiaoice It was launched in China by Microsoft in 2014 and is one of the most successful NLP (natural language processing) bots. Interestingly, the bot has learned to design images and patterns for fabrics based on words, themes, and key colors. Xiaoice has over 200 million users in Asia. | Automation Chatbot Howdy Released in 2015, Howdy is the first commercially available bot add-on for slack. It automates common office tasks, reviews progress, follows-up for progress, etc. It can also be trained to ask certain questions from the team members. The news is – Microsoft is acquiring Howdy. | Insurance Chatbot Hitee It is the world’s first insurance specific chatbot. It has defined workflows to segment the user intent through micro-conversations. Hitee understands industry-specific jargon. It is further equipped with machine learning models to get trained based on real chat data. | Conversational Therapy Chatbot Wysa It is a stress, sleep, and mindfulness therapy chatbot for emotional support. Apart from an empathetic conversation, Wysa is tracks mood and helps in reframes thoughts through its AI capabilities. It also supports appointment with a professional in instances of critical conversations. | Legal Chatbot DoNotPay Addressing the challenge that people are not usually aware of the rules and regulations that govern their everyday life, DoNotPay is a robot that brings the legal implications on fingertips. It helps users to appeal parking tickets in several cities, cancel a service/subscription, jump through any company’s support phone queue, schedule appointments, and sue anyone in small claims court. | Travel Chatbot Hipmunk Hipmunk is a travel chatbot that solves user’s travel-related queries. According to Adam Goldstein, CEO of Hipmunk – people run about 20 searches on average while planning a trip. Hipmunk understands users’ preferences and offers filtered travel suggestions, thus helping them save time in vacation planning. | Customer Service Chatbot Ada It is a live agent bot. Through simple drag and drop, users can train this bot to handle different messaging channels. According to Techvibes, Ada can automate more than 70% of customer interactions. What are your thoughts about these bots? I would be glad to expand the list. Do let me know about the remarkable chatbots of the century.

7 AI-powered Chatbots

245 Tools & Resources for Travelers and Digital Nomads

In author Adam Freedman notes that so alien are lawyers’ word choices that Congress, has been engineering dozens of “plain language” bills to regulate them. Such reforms have long been stymied, though, because many lawyers counter-punch that the law is just too complicated to reduce to “simple” words. The Curious World of Legalese In this context, we still have the legal jargon, mocked by writers like Dickens in the nineteenth century, in circulation. Professor Carl FelsenFeld, at Fordham University Law School, such as ‘witnesseth’, ‘herein’, and ‘duly’ which are commonly used despite the fact they “add no meaning”. He adds that it is not easy for the lawyer to stop using this language because “it means shaking the effects of a linguistic tradition professionally reinforced over centuries.” points to words Enter AI and the big Legalese Shakeup However, where other efforts have failed, advances in AI may prove the ultimate conqueror of Legalese. There has been a marked increase in legal AI companies (the current business players are shown in the above graphic) and $355million has been invested in . legal AI companies in 2018 alone Like Douglas Adams’ Babel fish, many of these solutions are translating an incomprehensible language (confusing and equally) — into plain English. This is vividly demonstrated with the launch of an app this month by 21-year-old entrepreneur and computer science major at Stanford University, Joshua Browder, allowing ordinary people to sue corporations by cutting away all the jargon. , a free chatbot offers AI-powered legal counsel that can be used to “sue anyone by pressing a button”. jurors businesses DoNotPay The chatbot works by cutting through the net of legalese, by asking you a series of basic intelligible questions about your situation and who you’d like to sue. It will then draw up the documents that you’ll need to send to the courthouse to become a plaintiff and will generate a script for you to read from if you need to attend in person. In a recent study, it was found that AI can understand Legalese better than experienced lawyers. The carried out by (the company I work at), LawGeex, in collaboration with top law academics at leading universities, involved exposing the AI to tens of thousands of legal documents. This taught the AI to understand the non-natural language of Legalese. Professor Yonatan Aumann lecturer at the Department of Computer Science at Bar Ilan University, and an advisor to LawGeex, says: _“_The AI’s mother tongue is Legalese. The algorithm can now identify concepts in such contracts even if they are worded in a way never seen before.” study Used at the to decide if companies can sign everyday documents (think NDAs, service agreements, SaaS agreements), this AI native-speaker of legalese operates in a far more sophisticated manner than a blunt “keyword search.” Keyword searches can be over- and under-inclusive, as words may be absent from relevant documents, or present in irrelevant documents. True AI recognizes a concept however it is phrased, or wherever it appears in a document. pre-signature phase Legalese being attacked across the contract stages Cracking legalese has become the holy grail when it comes to creating, reviewing and managing billions of contracts. Just as in the case of contract review (can I sign this?) it also applies to initial drafting of contacts (how do I draft this?). Companies such as Contract Express, HotDocs, and Bloomberg Law are researching new technology to achieve this, while Fortune 500 NetApp NetApp recently announced new AI technology for its legal department to create their contracts. This has been achieved through extracting pertinent information related to partnership agreements and uploading the information into the appropriate database. The company says it is than their previously entirely manual processes. 600 percent faster The use of AI-busting legalese in the is also vital, to uncover relevant information, particularly in light of ever-changing compliance rules, from IFRS, Brexit or Europe’s new General Data Protection Regulation. It represents a huge opportunity: the Fortune 500 is spending a combined alone on its response to Brussels’ GDPR, equating to almost$16m for each company. One of the legal AI players in this space, Kira Systems recently raised $50 million, unpicking Legalese to improve the accuracy of contract data extraction and regulatory compliance. Kira can quickly review large volumes of legacy and third-party vendor contracts and highlight only the data that may be affected by a change. It involves plowing through thousands of clauses of legalese, reducing the time spent on document review by 20–90%. post-signature phase US$7.8 billion The role of smart contracts British-American computer scientist Stephen Wolfram points out that the technology-based approach to breaking the legalese code is nothing new. In fact, he says, Gottfried Leibniz, back in the late 1600s, designed to turn all legal arguments into matters of pure logic that could potentially be resolved by a machine. But only today has technology caught up with law’s century-long head start in propagating legalese. Wolfram argues that with the advent of the blockchain, we are now close to writing a “computational contract that isn’t written in legalese but written in some computational intelligence language, which could actually be just executed by a computer if we chose to — as well as understood by humans”. In the words of another , and lawyer, Brett Cenkus: “the legal language needs to make its way into executable code”. Some early examples of so-called “smart contracts” include professional services firm EY, which has launched a smart contract and blockchain platform for the with a focus on global shipping. This Includes the ability to create and maintain asset data from multiple parties, to link data to policy contracts, and to receive and act upon information that results in a pricing or business change. Insurance giant AXA has also launched covering flight delays for consumers. sought to invent essentially computational concepts Hacker Noon contributor insurance sector self-executing contracts Calling time on Legalese Legalese, it turns out, is not a victimless crime, making technology’s inroads even more important. According to the Association of Contract Managers annual benchmark survey, only 12% of lawyers think contracts are understandable and easy to read. Its perpetuation of confusing language is also bad for consumers. The average American reads at an eighth-grade level. The average online terms of service, privacy policy, and consumer contract are written at a college level or beyond. Companies acting against Legalese Technology providers are already benefiting from a new attitude from forward-thinking big businesses (many of them tech companies themselves). Michael Dillion, Adobe’s senior vice president and General Counsel, was forced to change all his contracts at the Fortune 500 company multinational software company. : “Unfortunately, the brand of the legal profession is tainted by the perception that our inkwells are filled with obfuscation” as he surgically removed words like “hereinabove”, “mutadis mutandis” and “thereto” from his legal team’s contracts. He said Ending Legalese: From the Adobe Legal Department Style Guide The bar has been set by Shawn Burton, General Counsel at GE Aviation achieved. He : “I applied a litmus test: If someone in high school couldn’t pick this up and understand it without any context, it wasn’t plain enough”. says Witnesseth the Change Technology, and AI, in particular, may provide a way to end to complex legalese once and for all. This new era is promising to make clearer and faster the tortuous process of the law and giving power back to those whose first language is not legalese. This breakthrough could help translate an otherworldly language into simple instructions and clearer processes we can all understand. Jonathan Marciano is Communications Director at LawGeex

How AI Broke the Legalese Code

50+ High Growth Companies to Launch Your Career With One of the most challenging aspects of growing up is figuring out how and where to spend your time. The world of “career advice” is incredibly noisy. Professors, friends, parents, irrelevant medium authors — everyone is telling you what you should and should not be doing with your life. The good news → You get to decide how and where to spend your time. The other goods news is that the world is increasingly massive…and there are so many exciting things you could do…infinite places you could go and learn… it is your life! But why do we graduate from college and settle for conventional jobs that do not unlock our real potential? — Kevin Hartz I put together this list of high-potential opportunities for people (of all ages!) who are interested in leveraging technology as a vehicle for high-velocity change and impact. what I think to be The list spans companies of all sizes tackling all sorts of problems (Finance, Healthcare, Social, Construction, etc.). Hopefully this list can be helpful as you make your next move! A few notes/disclaimers: Be sure to make your own judgements with any of the opportunities presented here and recognize that this list is not “an official ranking” of any sorts. It is not “backed by data” or any hard metrics whatsoever. This list is by no means de facto or comprehensive. Feel free to disagree with and question everything :) This is just one of many resources — be sure to also check out & . StartupSift Breakout List You will notice that many of these companies may or may not be hiring for your “specific role.” Others have thousands and thousands of hungry applicants. That is okay! You may have to cold email, create a position, or find other unique ways to stand out. You can do it! have thoughts? need help? i'd love to chat :) message me on twitter or here - jordan gonen 🌊 And without further ado…here is… The Signal: 50+ High Growth Companies to Launch Your Career With 🚀 (late 2018) Finance Blend (disclaimer: I interned at Blend) Blend’s technology empowers top mortgage lenders to be more efficient, compliant, and borrower-friendly. Brex Corporate cards for startups. Online application, no personal guarantee, no security deposit required, and built for modern businesses. Powered by the Visa network. Carta Carta helps private companies, public companies, investors, and employees manage their cap tables, valuations, portfolio investments, and equity plans. Cash Square is a merchant services aggregator and mobile payment company that aims to simplify commerce through technology. Square Cash is their mobile app (a Venmo competitor)…“the easiest way to send and receive money on the fly.” Coinbase Coinbase is an online platform that allows merchants, consumers, and traders to transact with digital currency. It allows its users to create their own bitcoin wallets and start buying or selling bitcoins by connecting with their bank accounts. Even “How busy people master their money.” We partner with employers to offer Even as a benefit so that employees can get paid on demand. Paystack Modern online and offline payments for Africa. Shogun Shogun Enterprises is a financial technology platform for home improvement. Stripe Stripe is the best software platform for running an internet business. They handle billions of dollars every year for forward-thinking businesses around the world. Titan The modern investment firm committed to exceptional returns and advisory through actively managed portfolios. Life is not a dress rehearsal — this is probably it. Make it count. Time is extremely limited and goes by fast. Do what makes you happy and fulfilled — few people get remembered hundreds of years after they die anyway. — Sam Altman Insurance / Legal Atrium Atrium builds products and services to help automate legal workflows, innovate new processes, and help firms identify new clients. ClearCover Clearcover is the smarter car insurance choice, offering better coverage for less money. DoNotPay DoNotPay is an online robot lawyer that allows anyone to automatically claim asylum in the U.S, U.K, and Canada for free. Lemonade Lemonade offers homeowners and renters insurance powered by artificial intelligence and behavioral economics. Newfront Newfront is the modern commercial insurance brokerage. No 20-page applications, confusing policy terms, or painful renewal cycles. Newfront’s experienced brokers and technology remove the headache from business insurance. Root Root is a mobile-first insurance carrier that uses an app to rate drivers based primarily on how they actually drive — not who they are. “It is the ultimate luxury to combine passion and contribution. It’s also a very clear path to happiness.” — Sheryl Sandberg HR Gusto Gusto provides a cloud-based payroll, benefits, and human resource management solution for businesses. Humu Humu is a human resource company that makes work better through science and machine learning. Rippling Rippling provides cloud-based employee management solutions, from HR (payroll, benefits, compliance) to IT (computers, software, security). Truework Truework is an HR tool that automatically responds to lenders, landlords, and others who need to verify employment. Seize any opportunity, or anything that looks like opportunity. They are rare, much rarer than you think. — Taleb Healthcare / Biology Basis Basis is an app that allows people to deal and cope with mental health issues and offers same-day access to trained specialists. CoFactor Genomics The Leaders in RNA. Harness the power of multidimensional gene expression models to treat cancer more effectively. Forward Forward provides you with personalized primary care, combining world-class doctors with advanced medical technology including genetics, cancer screening & wellness tracking. Gyroscope Gyroscope is a new OS for the human body, with an app and website for people to view their health analytics. Hims Hims is an e-commerce wellness brand made for men with products for skin care, erectile dysfunction, and hair loss. They work with doctors to prescribe Finasteride and Sildenafil (active ingredient in Viagra) through the app or website. MDAcne MDacne is a mobile platform that uses AI and computer vision to help people with acne. Ro Ro is a mission-driven healthcare technology company that handles everything from online diagnosis to the delivery of medication. Synthego Founded by former SpaceX engineers, Synthego is a leading provider of genome engineering solutions. Their flagship product, CRISPRevolution, is a portfolio of synthetic RNA designed for CRISPR genome editing and research. Zipline Zipline builds products that improve access to healthcare and saves lives. I always did something I was a little not ready to do. I think that’s how you grow. When there’s that moment of ‘Wow, I’m not really sure I can do this,’ and you push through those moments, that’s when you have a breakthrough. — Marissa Meyer Food Cloud Kitchens Powering the on-demand food economy. They provide infrastructure and software that enables food operators to open delivery-only locations with minimal capital expenditure and time. Full Harvest Full Harvest helps growers get the most out of a harvest and food companies save money by bringing farm excess to market. They are a B2B platform connecting large farms to food businesses to sell significantly discounted, yet perfectly good surplus and imperfectly shaped produce that would have otherwise gone to waste. Impossible Impossible Foods develops a new generation of meats and cheeses made entirely from plants. They select specific proteins and nutrients from greens, seeds, and grains to recreate the experience of meats and dairy products. Uber Eats (disclaimer: I interned at Uber) Uber Eats is a food delivery platform that makes getting great food from a favorite local restaurants as easy as requesting a ride. Sensei SENSEI is here to guide you towards greater wellbeing. Their ecosystem of products and experiences is designed with one intention: to empower you to grow well. “Two ways to be successful in life: do something worth writing about or write something worth reading.” — Ben Franklin Government Anduril Anduril commits top technical talent to solving the most complex national security challenges. They’re building the next generation of technology that will aid and protect those who serve on the front lines defending the nation and its interests. Citizen The need has never been greater for technology that informs and protects the public. The Citizen app empowers people with information to help keep their families, communities, and cities safe. Users receive instant notifications every time a crime or other major incident is reported near them. Coord Coord is a mobility company that creates seamless mobility and self-driving experiences today through deep integrations. They offer bike-share API, Curbs API, Tolls API, Routing API and etc. Sidewalk Labs Sidewalk Labs is a new type of company that works with cities to build products addressing big urban problems. They’re building a platform and a set of urban applications to accelerate innovation in cities around the world. Whenever you find a barrel , you should hire them instantly, regardless of whether you have money for them or whether you have a role for them. Just close them. — Keith Rabois Logistics Convoy Convoy is a network of tech-enabled trucking companies transforming the $800B trucking industry and logistics ecosystem for truck drivers and shippers. Using technology, Convoy matches reliable trucks (“carriers”) with companies that need to ship freight. Flexport At Flexport, they believe that a world that does business together is a better one. It’s called global trade. And freight forwarding is the $1 trillion industry that functions as the circulatory system of global trade — without freight forwarding, global trade simply wouldn’t exist. Nabis Nabis delivers the most reliable, consistent, and secure logistics solution for cannabis businesses. Whether you are a brand, cultivator, intermediary processor, or final good manufacturer, Nabis provides you with access to an enterprise-scale distribution network. Nuro NURO is a technology company which aims to accelerate the benefits of robotics for everyday life. They are a team of entrepreneurs and engineers, designers, and scientists who believe the advancements they are making in robotics and machine learning today will dramatically improve the way they live tomorrow. Rubicon Rubicon Global is a technology company that provides waste, recycling, and smart city solutions to businesses and governments worldwide. They develop and deploys a full suite of cloud-based solutions to help its customers and network of independent waste haulers work towards more sustainable waste and recycling practices, uncover cost savings, and improve operations through data analytics. Uber for Business (disclaimer: I interned at Uber) Get an all-in-one solution that simplifies how businesses gets around. It’s a digital “headquarters” for all your company’s ground transportation. Get a clear view into all your trip activity and automate billing, expensing, and reporting. Easily provide rides — even multiple rides at the same time — to anyone important to your business. Uber Freight (disclaimer: I interned at Uber) Uber Freight is an app that matches carriers with shippers. Carriers can just tap a button and instantly book a load, and the price you see is the price you get — no more back-and-forth negotiations. Make friends over the internet with people who are great at things you’re interested in. The internet is one of the biggest advantages you have over prior generations. Leverage it. — Patrick Collison Real Estate / Construction Buildzoom BuildZoom has a simple purpose: to help you find the perfect contractor for any job — commercial or residential. Using BuildZoom is just like asking a neighbor for a recommendation — except instead of just asking one, you are polling every neighbor in your community, analyzing their feedback, exhaustively researching work histories and credentials and only then, making a final decision. Bungalow Bungalow is a residential real estate platform that provides renters with a more convenient, flexible, and communal living solution. It utilizes existing housing supply by signing long-term leases with homeowners, and offers multi-bedroom homes in some of the most desirable neighborhoods in cities throughout the United States. Opendoor Opendoor makes it possible to receive an offer on a home in just a few clicks, and sell in a matter of days, removing all of the headaches, uncertainties, and risks from the transaction. They are headquartered in San Francisco, California and has received a total of $645 million in venture funding from Khosla Ventures, GGV Capital, and Access… Qualia Qualia is a cloud-based closing platform that provides seamless and secure coordination between everyone involved in the real estate closing process. Wanderjaunt WanderJaunt offers technology-enabled property management solutions for travelers, homeowners, and accommodations from around the world. And then the last piece is actually the hardest, which is specific knowledge. Specific knowledge is knowledge that you have that lets you do something that other people do not know how to do and cannot be trained to do. — Naval Ravikant Education / Life / Talent Holloway With hundreds of hours of research, writing, and editing, their comprehensive Guides help you make better decisions. Hatch Baby Their mission is to bring parents a series of smart products that use technology and user-centric design to help make caring for a baby a little easier. Lambda School Lambda School trains people to be software engineers for free in exchange for a share of future income. Pioneer A home for the ambitious outsiders of the world. They’re building a community of creative young people working on interesting projects around the globe. TripleByte Triplebyte believes the current technical hiring process doesn’t do enough to help engineers show their strengths. They’re dedicated to building a better process. You can read more about their views on hiring in their manifesto. 70MillionJobs 70MillionJobs is the first for-profit employment job board for people with criminal records. “Everyone starts out with very, very humble beginnings” — Daniel Gross Social / Consumer Brandless Brandless is an e-commerce company providing unbranded and essential products. Jumprope Create and share recipe how-to’s. Export to Instagram Stories, IGTV, YouTube, your personal website and more. Masterclass MasterClass is a premier online education platform redefining the digital learning experience by bringing world-class experts and renowned instructors to students globally through a cutting-edge technology platform meant to distill knowledge and create meaningful experiences through online video. Sandbox VR Sandbox VR combines the latest VR hardware, movie quality real-time motion capture and AAA-quality content experiences to create the best VR experiences on the planet. Period. It’s the perfect event for team building, corporate events, and parties. People always say you should live your life as if it were your last day. I think you should live your life as though it will go on for ever; that every day is so good that you don’t want it to end. — Peter Thiel Dev Augur Augur is built on Ethereum, a decentralized blockchain network similar to the Bitcoin network. Utilizing this technology, their markets can effectively eliminate counterparty risk and centralized servers while creating a global market by employing cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin. Clearbit Clearbit develops business Intelligence APIs. Clearbit is on a mission to set the new standard in business data. Simply put — Clearbit is changing how modern businesses source and operationalize data as part of their sales, marketing, and product workflows. Deepgram Deepgram saves businesses time and money by building tailored speech recognition models that increase revenue and maximize productivity. Handshake Decentralized certificate authority and naming. VectorDash Vectordash lets you use insanely fast cloud GPUs at incredibly low costs. You can start a powerful GPU instance within seconds. The world is an incredibly complex place and everything is changing all the time. You can’t plan your career because you have no idea what’s going to happen in the future. You have no idea what industries you’ll enter, what companies you’ll work for, what roles you’ll have, where you’ll live, or what you will ultimately contribute to the world. You’ll change, industries will change, the world will change, and you can’t possibly predict any of it. — Marc Andreessen SaaS Tools Density Density is a modern infrastructure for anonymously counting people. Front Front redefines work communication with the first shared inbox for teams. By unifying your email, customer communication channels, and apps in one platform, Front helps teams collaborate efficiently and have more context and visibility into every conversation, to work faster and better together. Fullstory FullStory takes a fundamentally different approach to understanding your customer experience. One tiny script unlocks pixel-perfect playback, automatic insights, funnel analytics, and robust search and segmentation — all without the need to manually tag your site’s code. Openphone OpenPhone adds a second phone number on top of one’s existing mobile device with powerful features to help business stand out. Mixmax Mixmax offers software that enables its users to boost their productivity. It enables its users to track emails accurately, set up meetings in an instant, save time with email templates, and schedule emails to be sent later. Notion All-in-one workspace. Write, plan, collaborate, and get organized. Notion is all you need — in one tool. Superhuman Superhuman is not just another email client. They are rebuilding the inbox from the ground up to make you brilliant at what you do. They specifically designed it for those of you who want the best. Miscellaneous 100 Thieves 368 Aero Angel List Apple Health Atoms b8ta Culdesac Deos Houseparty Neon Panda Saildrone Social Construct Substack Transmission Ttyl Urbit have thoughts? need help? i'd love to chat :)

message me on twitter or here - jordan gonen 🌊 Hope this was valuable! If you enjoyed, please share and hit recommend 💙 Company descriptions are from . Crunchbase.com Thanks Jonathan Z. White & David Lee for feedback/edits.

The Signal

Written together with Tiffine Wang of Singtel Innov8, Ryan Morgan of DFJ Growth, and Frederick Dopfel of Samsung Ventures. The short version of this post was featured in VentureBeat Many have dreamed of robots taking over monotonous functions of our daily lives, freeing us humans to work on highly-skilled or creative tasks. Today, robots are increasingly making their way into our homes, offices, and public spaces, but this integration is not occurring in the way that most futurists and popular science fiction writers have anticipated. Here’s our top picks for tasks that were surprisingly easy to automate, and tasks that remain surprisingly hard. Tasks Surprisingly Easy to Automate: Art Prevailing wisdom claimed that computer systems would be incapable of creating art or music, because they lack the natural creativity of humans. However, automated systems have been surprisingly successful at generating works of art. Since the early 2000s, the University of London’s The Painting Fool program has been generating artwork, much of which has been featured in prominent galleries alongside human-created art. Google’s DeepDream software uses a recursive convolutional neural network to iteratively adjust images to morph them into objects in its database (usually dogs, buildings, and eyeballs). Other neural networks such as DeepStyle or Prisma use convolutional neural networks to stylize photos after the work of a specific artist. Google is now experimenting with automated curation of art exhibits through machine understanding of the style and topic of artists’ work. Logo generation systems like Withoomph, Tailor Brands, and Logojoy, use partially- or fully-automated systems to generate logos for a business based on keywords. Researchers have also demonstrated systems that can generate music: Stephen Wolfram has made an automated music generator available to the public since 2005, the University of Malaga has created Melomics, a system that autonomously composes and plays music to match your lifestyle and activities, and IBM has partnered with artists to help compose music with Watson by combining massive musical datasets and their lyrics with sentiment analysis. Although these automated art and music systems are arguably derivative on the work of others, they are undeniably interesting and beautiful in their own right. Many scholars may argue that, like artificial art, all human art is derivative, although that is a discussion best left to philosophers. It appears that natural human creativity is not, in fact, necessary to create beauty. Science/Research Historically, scientific research has been conducted by highly educated researchers and lab assistants, and as such was not an obvious place for a blossoming of applications. However, a core basis of science is reproducibility, and many aspects of science and research are extremely repetitive, requiring neither continuous thought nor the high level of education attained by the individuals who perform those tasks today. robotics Companies such as OpenTrons are working to save scientists both time and money by helping them automate pipetting, a precise but monotonous and labor intensive task used in many biological and chemical laboratories. Startups Arcturus and BioRealize enable scientists to remotely run many genetic engineering experiments in parallel, greatly reducing mistakes and lab time. Other startups, such as Emerald Therapeutics and Transcriptic, are hoping to move research to the cloud, using remote robotic systems to perform the experiment itself. In addition to vastly increased lab efficiency, these systems could greatly improve reproducibility, as researchers need only share their experiment’s source code. Not content with automating manual lab work, machines are now automating scientific discovery and understanding. Scientists at Cornell’s AI lab created a program called Eureqa, that uses an evolutionary approach to model creation and is able to create models on data without being given any prior assumptions. The team has since commercialized the technology through a spinout, Nutonian. Researchers at Cambridge and Aberystwyth have created a similar autonomous science algorithm called Adam, which they claim was the first machine to independently discover new scientific knowledge. That same team moved on to the University of Manchester, where they created Eve, which is a robot designed to make the drug discovery process faster and cheaper. As the pace of scientific research increases, scientists may rely more and more on automated systems. Legal The practice of law requires many years of studying and understanding laws, cases, and other legal precedence. Law firms often employ large teams of paralegals and interns to perform the majority of initial research; current AI technologies can augment and eventually automate the bulk of that research, leaving the more difficult aspects of practicing law such as synthesizing the information and advising to trained legal professionals. To date, case law, contract law, and advocacy law have seen the most automation. Startup DoNotPay helps users appeal traffic tickets; the bot started in the UK and has expanded to cover several US cities. Over a quarter million tickets have been successfully challenged, and several cities have banned the bot. ROSS Intelligence augments legal research by using AI to surface relevant legal passages and cases to increase the efficiency and quality of legal research. eBrevia uses AI to extract data from contracts to accelerate diligence, contract analysis, and other related applications. Legalist automates the qualification process for litigation financing and backs cases they identify as having a high success rate. There is a ceiling, imposed by liability concerns, to how much law can be automated; a startup might expose itself if it advised a client on legal matters, so most companies likely can only research and synthesize information. Because much of the legal industry charges by the hour, it will be interesting to see to what degree lawyers will accept automation and other tools to increase the efficiency of their practice. Policing and Security Unlike warfighting robots, which have clearance to hurt or even kill humans, robots that work as a police force or physical premises security, particularly in areas far from any war zone, are expected to more closely follow Asimov’s three laws of robotics: avoiding injury to humans while still keeping an area secure. For this reason, many would expect criminals to ignore robotic security guards, knowing full well that the robots could not harm them. However, the primary function of human physical security teams is to observe and report security incidents; due to the risk of liability to their employers, many human guards are not allowed to interfere, making their work surprisingly easy to automate. Security automation to date has focused on augmenting existing security forces, inexpensively amplifying the eyes and ears of security guards without increasing their numbers. Traditionally, fixed camera systems could perform this task, but constantly monitoring a large campus by camera is difficult. Knightscope and Gamma 2 Robotics build ground-based security robots that act as “force multipliers” to provide deterrence through physical presence; these robots are being deployed at an increasing number of corporate campuses and shopping malls. Another startup, Nightingale Security, is using flying drone robots to help their customers carry out continuous surveillance. In time, robots may replace substantial portions of police and security forces, requiring humans only for resolving violent incidents. security Tasks Shockingly Hard to Automate Cleaning Cleaning is perhaps one of the most obvious and logical applications for robots, yet with the exception of the occasional household Roomba, robotic cleaning is not widespread. Not only is cleaning an extremely repetitive task that requires very little technical skill, but it is also a task that almost everyone has to do in their personal lives and despises. What makes the dearth of cleaning robots more perplexing is that the cleaning robot Roomba was one of the first commercially available robots to everyday consumers in 2002. Almost fifteen years later, there has not been any real innovation in terms of cleaning robots that has seen commercial success. While Roomba, which is made by iRobot is the best known of these robots, competing products are made by a healthy list of competitors, including Dyson and LG. On the commercial side of the market, work on an automated janitor / cleaner has gone back at least as far as the 1980s, when Electrolux’s subsidiary, The Kent Company was working on a solution. Yet somehow, to this day, cleaning on a commercial scale is still done by hand. Several employees of Kent went on to create a company called Intellibot that creates a large scale automated floor cleaner called TASKI. Another large scale floor cleaner, the RS26, comes from a collaboration of Brain Corp and International Cleaning Equipment. With that said, there are some very interesting applications on the horizon outside of floor cleaning robots. The startup Ecoppia is using robots to clean solar panels, and Kurion has a division that makes robots that are used to clean up nuclear facilities, including Fukushima. Clothing and Textiles It is surprising that textile manufacturing, one of the first industries to flourish in the industrial revolution through automation remains an incredibly hard to automate completely. Robots work best when manipulating solid objects. Textiles, however, shear, stretch, and compress, making them difficult for robots to manipulate, even though such manipulation comes naturally to humans. Machines today can dye and cut fabrics into the right shape for assembly and embroider intricate designs in an instant, but nimble human fingers are still required for assembling that fabric, sewing on buttons, pockets, and adding on delicate finishing touches such as lace and pleats. Even today, few companies have made any headway in sewing. Softwear Automation is one such company, which uses high speed cameras to instantaneously map the position and orientation of a textile as it flexes and bends, allowing the robot to make micro-adjustments as it sews pieces of fabric together. Nike is using automation to circumvent the traditional shoe assembly process altogether with its FLYKNIT line of shoes, which uses robotics to custom-knit the top portion of a shoe out of one continuous thread, doing away with the need to assemble the shoe from multiple separate pieces of material. Alternative textile and clothing manufacturing techniques such as 3D printing are been heralded as poised to revolutionize the fashion industry, but the items created by these processes and new materials remain niche outside of the athletic wear market. Automation has struggled with clothing care almost as much as it has with sewing. Although machines can wash and dry clothing (sometimes in the same machine), the process of loading, unloading, and folding remains repetitive and laborious with few reasonable automated alternatives. Startups Laundroid and Foldimate have developed laundry folding robots, although their solutions are large desktop or closet-sized machines with limited capacity. Robotic clothes care systems similar to those imagined in science fiction are likely many years away. Farming Automating the harvesting of crops that are today picked by hand has so far been hard because many of these crops can be damaged easily and computers have had trouble with visual recognition of the fruit or produce they are trying to pick. Despite these challenges, there are many companies working towards fully automating a variety of agricultural tasks. Harvest Automation has created a robot called the HV-100 that can do a series of tasks in nurseries and greenhouses. According to one of their customers at McCorkle Nurseries, “We have many plants in the field that have been growing for as many as 24-months; they’ve been spaced, collected and spaced again and they haven’t been touched by a person since the day they were potted.” In the fruit picking space, companies such as FFRobotics, Abundant Robotics, and Vision Robotics have worked on solutions for fruit picking. While none of their products are widespread yet, their efforts are helping pave the way towards a more automated world. Abundant Robotics, for instance, is avoiding many of the difficulties of robotic grippers and instead using a suction device to pick fruit. There are also a series of startups working on weeding and thinning robots. Among these are Naio Technologies, which has created a robot called Oz for small scale weeding. It is also working on a robot called Dino for larger scale weeding, and a robot named Ted for vineyard weeding. It should also be noted that many of the the traditional agricultural players are also working towards automating the farm. John Deere has offered some form of kit for autonomy for years, the current version being AutoTrac. While not in farming, Deere also offers a robot called the Tango E5, which is essentially a Roomba for mowing a lawn. Other competitors in the autonomous tractor space include AGCO and Kinze. AGCO, through its subsidiary Kendt, is working on a project they call MARS, or Mobile Agricultural Robot Swarms. These swarms of small farming robots will be dragged into fields in logistics units (which also hold seed supply as well as batteries for the robots), and then split up to do their work. Looking ahead Several themes emerge from this overview that enable us to predict what’s next for the robotics industry. Today, robotics have made significant headway into automating repetitive tasks requiring little finesse and tolerant of blunt solutions, like washing laundry and dishes or creating large quantities of textiles. Tasks that require processing large amounts of data and information can also be augmented by automation. On the other hand, tasks that require complicated manipulation of materials are still difficult to automate and need more skilled assistance, as does the deeper decision making and synthesis of information that robotics help us surface. As much as robotics have transformed many major industries, the need for humans to complete the last finishing steps, as diminishing as they may be, makes it abundantly clear that total robotic world domination remains out of reach.

Top Unexpectedly Easy and Surprisingly Difficult Use Cases for Automation

The future will be automated An irregular round-up of creative coding inspirations and disruptions in advertising, social, urban play and human computer interaction. The age of the bot has begun. We just have barely begun to notice. It’s only been 10 years, and smartphones have fundamentally changed our world, the bot revolution will come quicker, and have an even greater impact. The bots cometh in all shapes and sizes, and , automations, AI and robot friend and foe. But most likely our most common interaction with them in the very near future will be in the form of messenger/personal assistant and customer service bots. hardware software History of Bots Primer: ELIZA: The history of bots can really be traced backs to the 60s to MIT, when wrote ELIZA, a textbot, based on very simple pattern recognition, that would respond in way a therapist would, by throwing questions back at you and with answers such as “How does that make you feel?” ELIZA, became immensely popular and had a huge influence on a number of early computer games. But Weizenbaum was troubled by people’s reaction. He intended ELIZA to be a mere parody of human conversation, yet suddenly users were confiding their deepest thoughts to it, and soon became a detractor.Chat with ElIZA here: Eliza chats with Siri: Joseph Weizenbaum http://nlp-addiction.com/eliza/ https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/1miydk/i_was_able_to_get_siri_to_communicate_with_eliza/ ALICE: A.L.I.C.E. (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity), inspired by ELIZA, became the de facto bot, and bot software in the mid-90s, as the internet boomed and spawned 100s of versions, like , or due to its relative ease of programming. And this is the most important trend to watch for as the chatbot indystry gears up. As they become easier to build, bots will become the domain of hobbyists and fans bringing along the really interesting unintended and creative uses. Alice talks to Fake Captain Kirk: Fake Captain Kirk Jack Sparrow Santa Bot http://www.pandorabots.com/pandora/talk?botid=f5d922d97e345aa1 SmarterChild: SmarterChild was a chatterbot with a personality, available on AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Messenger and was a massive massive hit in the early 2000s. Much like what messenger bots are trying to do today, beyond just holding a conversation, SmarterChild wanted to be useful, tapping into web services to provide sports scores, weather forecasts, stocks, and other info. http://motherboard.vice.com/read/a-history-of-smarterchild GooglyMinotaur: One of the more interesting uses of the SmarterChild technology was by Radiohead, with a bot named — music’s first ever chatbot. Googly (as is googly eyes, not Google) gave fans access to real time information about Radiohead, obscure Radiohead trivia, played music upon request and even challenged you to a game of hangman. It was a huge success with over a million people engaging in conversations with the bot (and averaging over 60 interactions per person). Average time spent per user was over 34 minutes.Here’s a great writeup from one of its makers: GooglyMinotaur https://chatbotsmagazine.com/radiohead-s-googlyminotaur-ee91cd600a4a#.66gq0762q Sylvie: The last most important bot I need to mention is Sylvie. launched in 2000, by Virtual Personalities, and with whom I had the good fortune working with back in the day. Sylvie was a Verbot (Virtual Robot) developed by futurists (who invented, um, banner advertising) and (founder of one of the original search engines ), and was the first practical commercial 3D avatar interface. Here’s a TED talk about Sylvie: Peter Plantec Dr. Michael Mauldin Lycos Artbots: Faxbot: constantly monitors Yelp for reviews of prisons and whenever the script finds a new review it automatically sends a fax to that prison with the Yelp star rating and content of the new review. Faxbot http://lav.io/2014/11/yelp-prison-review-faxbot/ Um, er, um parliament: “Parliament Live”, is a great project by net artist is a bot that creates art by downloading videos from the UK parliament at random, then transcribing and analysing which words were spoken most frequently. Using that analysis, the bot generates a new cut of the video containing only the top keywords. Sam Levine https://twitter.com/parliament_live Crowdsourcing a president: Laprimaire is using bot technology to help crowd-source the next president of France http://venturebeat.com/2016/06/23/laprimaire-has-built-a-telegram-chatbot-to-help-crowdsource-the-next-president-of-france/ https://laprimaire.org/ Inferno, Robot Dystopia: Robots and prosthetics have always had a close relationship. But artists Louis-Philippe Demers and Bill Vorn take it to another level with their dystopian robotic artwork, Inferno. Mech suit-like exoskeletons are worn by the performer, who are forced by the robots to act/react in a certain way. http://billvorn.concordia.ca/menuall.html More dystopia with machines hacking machines — the world’s first all-machine hacking tournament is happening next month organised by (those guys who, you know, ) with a $2 million prize up for grabs. DARPA brought us the internet https://www.cybergrandchallenge.com/ http://www.wired.com/2016/07/__trashed-19/ How do we stop intelligent machines from taking over the world and enslaving us all? Give them emotions: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-36387734 Two thirds of robots find their work boring: http://www.creativeapplications.net/arduino-2/make-longer-cables-short-film-by-students-at-hfg-schwabisch-gmund/ Shiv Integer: explorers mutant gadgets, with a bot expropriating 3D models from open-source hardware design website, , mashing designs together and then re-uploading its sometimes humorous, sometimes scary creations. Like any good art, the bot has created a mix of outrage and fandom amongst the Thingiverse community. Shiv Integer Thingiverse _Shiv Integer is a bot whose entire purpose in life is to create bizarre objects for 3D printers. It has been living for…_arstechnica.com That time a bot invaded Thingiverse and created weird new 3D objects The Next Rembrandt: A great use of technology, JWT’s The Next Rembrandt used Artificial Intelligence to analyse the master’s paintings to create a new work of art. The project has involved data scientists, developers, engineers and art historians. The final 3D printed painting consists of more than 148 million pixels and is based on 168,263 Rembrandt painting fragments. award winning https://www.nextrembrandt.com/ Seeing AI: One of the most impressive use-cases for AI around at the moment is Microsoft’s cognitive services bringing sight to the sightless: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/microsofts-new-ai-tools-help-developers-build-smart-apps-and-bots/ Swarm Robotics: Swarm robotics is one of the most exciting robotic research fields. imagines a world where a swarm of display blocks autonomously reconfigure themselves: Curious Displays http://boingboing.net/2010/02/22/concept-for-swarming.html And this reality is closer than you think. Disney Research , and put some of the ideas into practice: has released a paper http://www.wired.com/2014/05/disney-invents-swarming-robots-that-create-animations/ MIT’s SENSEable City Laboratory developed prototypes for the Flyfire pixel display in the sky: http://senseable.mit.edu/flyfire/ Drone 100: Recently Intel partnered with for from their beautiful world record breaking 3D drone display: Ars Electronica Drone 100 http://iq.intel.com/100-dancing-drones-set-world-record/ Music for Robots: Do androids dream of electric sheep? Not sure. But apparently they’re into funky jazz. teamed up with to create ‘Music For Robots’ by robots. Squarepusher Rhizomatiks http://www.creativeapplications.net/maxmsp/squarepusher-x-z-machines-the-making-of-stupendous-music-machines/ Racing bots: And finally let’s end with some super exciting news that robots will begin racing against each other at high speeds. , the world’s first driverless Robotic car race, is currently in it’s testing phase, and will begin racing proper next year, held on the same tracks as the Formula E championship season. German concept designer and automotive futurist Daniel Simon, best known for his vehicle designs in movies like Tron: Legacy, Captain America and Oblivion, has designed the cars, which are predicted to go at speeds of around 300km/h and navigate much more exciting courses. Watch the action unfold in the Inside Roborace documentary series: RoboRace _The first global autonomous car racing championship will start in 2016, the creators of Formula E have announced. Known…_www.wired.co.uk Formula E announces 300kph ‘RoboRace’ championship http://roborace.com/ Yamaha has also built a robotic motorcycle — MotoBot: Robots in the home: Robots are coming to our homes too, but they won’t do the dishes just yet. , one in ten Americans will have a robot in home by 2020, and the race is already gearing up. Just about everyone’s a /speaker . According to Juniper Research has home assistant or is building one Jibo, the world’s first social robot for the home, looks to be the cutest: https://www.jibo.com/ Then there’s Zenbo from Asus: http://zenbo.asus.com/ And Softbank’s Pepper, which has been sold out from the get go: https://www.engadget.com/2014/06/12/home-robot-pepper/ Though just a prototype, ’ newest robot, the kind of cute, kind of scary, Spot Mini, won’t do the dishes for you but will at least pack the dishwasher: Boston Dynamics Though, says Engadget, our robot butler dreams are still a long way away: https://www.engadget.com/2016/06/03/asus-zenbo-proves-our-robot-butler-dreams-remain-just-that/ Chat/Messenger Bots: Messaging apps have already surpassed social networks for monthly active users and messaging will become the primary path for customer interaction within the next five years. So understandably . Two months after it’s launch, . there’s a lot of fanfare around messenger bots Facebook Messenger now already had over 11,000 chatbots But is it all hype? Well yes and no. Chat bots and artificial Intelligence are still pretty . But this is really pretty much still day zero, and it’s the , rather than the reality that has started a gold rush. sucky promise The end game is to turn mobile messaging into an that consumers can essentially live in — to and , and , add context to a conversation, and of course to . Already the hype was, well just that, hype. But the promise is exciting, and as always we’ll see some kind of middle ground and some breakaway sticky stuff. all-encompassing platform make payments bookings access content services get customer service shop So are there really any good messenger bots out there? Well there’s some kind promise… Jessie: Of all those I’ve tried , is one of the better chatbots I’ve encountered. She’s is a quirky, energetic 20-something experiencing crisis after crisis, all the while looking for a job, a boyfriend, and a new apartment. You assume the role of Jessie’s friend and provide advice. Jessie https://pullstring.com/product/humani/ http://www.fastcompany.com/3059112/most-creative-people/i-spent-a-week-talking-to-a-millennial-chatbot-character-on-facebook Jessie was developed by one of the more promising platforms out there, with the founders were behind (developers of talking toys like Hello Barbie and Thomas The Tank Engine & Friends Talk to You) and have worked on Pixar movies such as Wall-E and Toy Story. Pullstring Toytalk Probably the most successful modern messenger bot to date, Pullstring were also responsible for the where fans could chat with the ​characters, get clues to a code to unlock the reveal trailer and be awarded a special digital badge for use in the current version of the game. More than six million messages were exchanged between fans and the chatbot on the first day alone (with 30K simultaneous conversations happening per second), and resulted in eight times more social media engagements than any other Call of Duty​ launch to date. C​all of Duty: Infinite Warfare Messenger campaign http://venturebeat.com/2016/05/03/call-of-duty-infinite-warfares-first-victory-6m-bot-messages-on-facebook/ Hugging Face: Hugging Face is a fun digital AI friend — in essence you can text back and forth and trade selfies. I haven’t tried it yet, sounds suprisingly engaging: _Meet Hugging Face, a new chatbot app for bored teenagers. The New York-based startup is creating a fun and emotional…_techcrunch.com Hugging Face wants to become your artificial BFF _Hugging Face, a company named after the hugging face emoji, is bringing its AI bot from private to public beta today…_venturebeat.com Hugging Face launches app to be your 'AI friend' Xiaoice — the world’s most talked to bot: Microsoft’s Xiaoice, , is a chatbot on Weibo, and other social networks in China with over 20 million registered users, where the average user interacts with the service around 60 times a month. Introduced in 2014 by Microsoft Research and Bing in Beijing, it can answer simple questions, and engage in real-life human chatter. Cortana’s little sister http://www.businessinsider.sg/microsoft-xiaoice-turing-test-in-china-2016-2/ Chatting to Miss Piggy: Another company to watch is , who’ve already worked with Disney and Universal on some pretty large projects. My favourite being , where you can only chat to her directly before and after her show. Imperson Miss Piggy And a whole bunch of other reading: Pizza Hut allows you to order on Twitter and Facebook: Sephora lets you to send a selfie to try on lipstick: http://fortune.com/2016/07/13/pizza-hut-chatbot-twitter-facebook/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelarthur/2016/06/21/augmented-reality-bot-brings-virtual-lipstick-try-on-to-facebook-messenger/#6590fce12067 Everything you wanted to know about bots but were too afraid to ask, in one nice concise Medium post: https://medium.com/art-marketing/the-hidden-homescreen-70c794ff9ada#.dchq9klvs In many ways Slack is leading the bot wars: http://www.wired.com/2015/08/slack-overrun-bots-friendly-wonderful-bots/ Ray Kurzweil, best known for his views on , and is building a chatbot for Google: the Singularity http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/27/11801108/ray-kurzweil-building-chatbot-for-google 25 chatbot startups you should know: http://blog.ventureradar.com/2016/06/14/25-chatbot-startups-you-should-know/ Why Microsoft is betting its future on AI: Meanwhile things went horribly wrong for Microsoft’s AI Twitter bot Tay: http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/7/12111028/microsoft-bot-framework-artificial-intelligence-satya-nadella-interview http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-chatbot-racist Wired argues, if you want your bot to be more human-like, teach it to chit chat: http://www.wired.com/2016/01/clive-thompson-12/ But beware the uncanny valley: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/beware-emotional-robots-giving-feelings-artificial-beings-could-backfire-study-suggests BBC asks would it be possible (or moral) to love a robot? http://www.bbc.co.uk/guides/zqq6sg8 in Hong Kong is one of the leaders in human-like robotics: Hason Robotics http://www.cnbc.com/2016/03/16/could-you-fall-in-love-with-this-robot.html Watch two semi-Ai bots creapliy chat and flirt with each other: http://digg.com/video/chatbot-nightmare-conversation FastCompany suggests the next phase of UX will be designing personalities: http://www.fastcodesign.com/3054934/the-next-phase-of-ux-designing-chatbot-personalities Services like donotpay will enable us to navigate our rights, through the legal quagmire, and bring the balance of the law get information quicker: http://venturebeat.com/2016/06/27/donotpay-traffic-lawyer-bot/ Skynet is a pretty cool old-school bot that functions as a web portal: http://www.skynet-ai.com/bots/AI/SkynetV6/ Beware Skype scam bots and fake webcam girls: https://blog.malwarebytes.com/threat-analysis/2014/06/skype-chatbot-scam-fails-miserably/ http://blog.emsisoft.com/2013/04/25/new-skype-scam-uses-chat-bots-fake-webcam-girls-want-your-credit-card-information/ Ok, well that’s all folks. Hope you enjoyed this very looooong edition. This is such a wide and important topic, but hopefully it got you a teensy bit excited about our robots near future. Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/radarboy3000/ Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/radarboy_japan Like my Facebook Page to get tutorial and workshop updates here: https://www.facebook.com/radarboy3000

The Robots Cometh: The Age of Bots has Arrived

According to McKinsey, 70 percent of businesses worldwide will be at least one tool powered by artificial intelligence by 2030. The consulting company’s says that the AI global market can grow up to 13 billion USD in a decade giving a 16 percent boost to the economy. using research Artificial intelligence applications are rapidly expanding across all industries helping them recover after the pandemic. Here is the list of the most high-potential AI uses for the next few years. Hyperautomation Intelligent Process Automation, or IPA, allows automating digital processes using artificial intelligence. IPA includes Digital Process Automation (DPA) for data management and process improvement, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for bringing cost-efficiency to corporate functions of Accounting, Legal compliance, Payments, etc., and Artificial Intelligence (AI) which analyses collected information and recommends actionable decisions based on historical data. According to McKinsey’s research, operational cost-efficiency by up to 35 percent in companies utilizing IPA-based solutions. To achieve this high-performance rate, AI determines weak spots in workflow and suggests actions to improve them. As a result, AI-powered software requires less human involvement in data management which subsequently allows cutting expenses on manpower. improved For example, Bancolombia, a Latin-American banking group, managed to reduce operational errors by 28 percent by manual tasks with robotic. The technology upgrade also resulted in higher customer satisfaction. replacing AI Chips The global chipset market is to reach $57.8 billion by 2026. Chips powered by Artificial Intelligence will be used in industrial and retail robotics, hardware utilities, and a variety of other domains including Healthcare. going AI-powered chipsets collect and analyze data enabling real-time optimization. The technology allows a chipset to perform certain tasks remotely, with no need to contact a central server. For example, AI chips by Edge high efficiency of remote operation, autonomously from hub software. Chips collect data from connected IoT sensors and take decisions on process improvement by themselves, helping to save time on process management. demonstrates AI for Defence According to Meticulous Research, the global AI in the cybersecurity market will $46.3 billion by 2027. Why is the estimate so high? reach The reason is the trend for global connectivity that leads to a higher risk of fraud and security breaches. Artificial Intelligence algorithms can be trained to immediately recognize and automatically block unauthorized access attempts or suspicious activity. Additionally, AI-powered programs can be used to effectively train defense specialists by creating numerous controversial situations based on real and presumable dangers. For example, the most AI projects in the US military are Project Maven, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Squad X Experimentation Program, and the OFFSET program. The programs exploit AI to advance defense utilities and train the responsible. popular Chatbots and Sexbots According to a Research and Markets report, AI in the chatbot market is going to hit $13.9 billion by 2025. Nowadays chatbots are widely used in customer support services acting as a first-to-go tool to communicate your question. Natural Language Processing technology (NLP) used in chatbots has a rich vocabulary at first and develops it with time after conversations with customers. Artificial Intelligence copies human verbal behaviour and genuinely reflects it in further communication. A well-trained chatbot can save up to 90 percent of the customer care expense spent. Another fast-growing application of chatbots is sexbots. Unlike chatbots designed for troubleshooting, sexbots are used in empathic communication. They bring intimacy and the necessary level of compassion to the table. An impressive benefit of sexbots is that, along with other robotized technologies applied in the sex industry, they allow disabled people to express themselves in the way they want. Generally, the sex tech industry is growing fast, and the total market is expected to reach $52.7 billion by 2026. This growth offers multiple benefits to AI sexbot development. For example, by RealDoll is the most popular sexbot up to date. It can mimic human facial emotions and carry a conversation with a human. The sexbot learns from its speakers and reproduces similar behaviour in a corresponding situation. Harmony Predictive Analytics One of the prime goals of AI development is the deep analytics opportunities that AI opens when it comes to big data. Using its Machine Learning algorithms, Artificial Intelligence can aggregate impressive volumes of data that cannot be processed by human beings. Instead of a human, AI analyses big data and offers well-reasoned decisions based on it. AI for Legal AI can be trained to perform certain attorney duties. It can take months for a human to verify a heap of documents or a few minutes for an AI-powered program to do the same task. A machine cannot replace people at all due to circumstances often dependent on the human factor - in such a case a human expert will need to interfere for a resolution. However, AI is a friend-in-need when it comes to simpler operations. Artificial Intelligence-powered technologies are already used in smart video control systems in traffic control where AI identifies improper behaviour or speed limit violations, and automatically signs of a penalty to an identified car owner. Example: The DoNoPay AI-powered robot lawyer that drivers to manage parking tickets is now being extended to assist with over 100 different areas of consumer rights including customer service disputes like airline flight compensation or subscription cancellation. helps The Internet of Behaviours The Internet of Behaviours, or IoB, allows tracking person location, face and fingerprint recognition, and human behaviour identification. IoB solutions are used in user experience analysis, activity predictions, and instant services. During the pandemic, IoB solutions became highly demanded because businesses and institutions had to immediately have a tool for remote identification of unusual human behaviour. In a fall detection solution, AI an unsafe situation through video control or a wristband device and immediately warns its owner and the connected relatives about the possible falling of the owner. recognizes It is expected that IoB will be used in half of all global software by 2025. Nick Grebenkine, a private investor focusing on AI solutions, believes that IoB will remain the most influential technology for decades due to its high impact on people lies. For example, IoB AI-powered solutions are widely during the pandemic in the US, China and other countries to remotely control human body temperature and safety measures compliance. used AI vs HR Artificial Intelligence can help identify a perfect candidate by using relevant search keywords. In talent acquisition, it takes a lot of time to look through hundreds of CVs. AI can replace recruiters in selecting the best-matching specialists in a few clicks saving hours - and thousands of dollars - on candidate search. You simply enter the keywords and requirements you need and wait for the system to make decisions for you. For example, Artificial Intelligence is used on all online job search platforms such as LinkedIn, Glassdoor, CareerBuilder, and others. AI in Healthcare In Healthcare, Artificial Intelligence is used in medical research and diagnostics. With AI, we don’t need to risk human lives anymore. Instead, we input the medical data into a program and wait for it to predict the probability of various outcomes. Thus, AI saves millions of dollars and years spent on data evaluation, research, and testing. Through high-accurate analysis, AI also saves the lives of dozens of human beings and animals that used to sacrifice their health to find out if a drug was effective. AI is used in the diagnostics of a wide range of diseases including diabetes and autism. Using medical databases and predictive analysis, AI develops diagnoses with recommended treatment advice. A key benefit of AI in Healthcare is the level of preciseness. While there are multiple unknowns where a medical procedure can go wrong, AI can predict an outcome per various scenarios, either in impossible or in the most probable circumstances. For example, ConsumerMedical has a special AI-based program to predict surgery effects. Analyzing patient data, the program estimates the probability of negative consequences of operative intervention and allows predicting what the patient will look like after the surgery. developed Banking In Banking, Artificial Intelligence is leveraged in Cybersecurity, Robotic Process Automation, Internet of Behaviour, Big Data Analysis, Payments, chatbots, support and customer service automation, smart credit calculators, investment predictions, etc. AI in the banking market is expected to reach $447 billion by 2023. A huge benefit of AI in Banking is that a single technology keeps the knowledge of the centuries-old industry, automatically tuning the requirements up to date in full compliance with the industry regulations. For example, almost every bank has applied AI technology to its software. These include Bank of America, JPMorgan, BNP Paribas, UniCredit, Deutsche Bank, and others. Food industry The coronavirus pandemic has boosted the use of AI and robotics in the food industry. AI-powered supply chain management programs help to limit food waste, track crop and food production, control the quality of production, track inventory load, and even suggest stock supply. Artificial Intelligence in the food and beverage market was estimated at $3.07 billion in 2020. The share is expected to grow up to $29.94 billion by 2026. For example, Firmenich Flavors, a perfume and taste company, has relied on AI algorithms to a flavour based on program recommendations. This move is expected to be followed by other creative food ideas developed by a digital mind. create Wildlife In wildlife, Artificial Intelligence is used in the control of wild animal populations, habitats, and existing dangers. AI analyses the relation between wild animals and humans, dependence on weather conditions, and risks due to man-made changes. AI-powered programs can predict if a species is endangered, or if it needs special attention. To enable this analysis, wildlife researchers track animals with IoT sensors and chips put on their skin. Besides that, they watch animals in real-time using ground patrols and air video control systems. Thanks to the use of AI, the researchers have found out that the African forest elephant population has decreased by 65 percent since 2010, and rhinoceros have come close to extinction due to extermination by poachers. This knowledge helps to refocus the efforts to help the animals survive. For example, The Protection Assistant for Wildlife Security app collects data from IoT sensors, ground patrols, and video control systems to create AI-based mathematical models of species population changes. Fashion Retail has suffered a lot from the pandemic, and its resurrection strongly depends on Artificial Intelligence progress in the industry. This idea is by the fact that half of the retailers who had no AI-powered optimization before the pandemic had to face bankruptcy afterward. supported AI in the global fashion market is expected to reach $7.3 billion by 2022. AI solutions are used in smart product recommendations, upselling, and cross-selling on websites. Using AI, you can suggest customer products based on their size and preferences, match clothes with accessories, and even recognize apparel in their photos to suggest similar items. For example, Look.ai is one of a few image-recognition apps on Shopify that help customers apparel in uploaded images and suggest similar products from a retailer store. identify Prospects According to PwC, , with $6.6 trillion coming from improved productivity and $9.1 trillion coming from sales improvement. AI can save up to $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030 Believe it or not, in a few years AI will become a leading technology in the global economy, and the sooner businesses hatch it the better they will be prepared for any economic obstacles.

AI Will Drive The Market By 2030

When Programming is Not Fun When the iteration loop is long, programming becomes frustrating. Let’s say you have to change a low-level system that lacks a way to test it directly. To test the new code, you have to manually execute a complex series of time-consuming and onerous steps. When something goes wrong, all you know is either your code is broken (for some unknown reason), or you exposed an existing issue in the monstrous system that depends on your change. It’s even worse when the code cannot be tested in a reproducible way, and you get a different behavior with each run. If that isn’t frustrating enough, imagine you are unable to implement the solution you envisioned. You can’t directly access the low-level system because a series of components — meant to abstract, simplify and create a safe alternative to your low-level system — are in the way. The components accomplish little of their stated purposes, but force your final design to be slower and more complex than necessary. Finally, you learn that the dev environment you are testing doesn’t match the behavior of production in crucial, important ways. This is what feels like to write queries for many websites. It’s not fun. Let’s fix that. database In this post I’ll show how to make database fun by using packages that make testing easy. I’ll walk through a example of building a durable queue backed with PostgreSQL. programming Isolated Temporary Databases To make database programming fun, we need a quick way to iterate. We need to bring up instances of our database, PostgreSQL in my case, and directly test the queries we are writing. One excellent option is . I’m going to utilize a Haskell analog I wrote called and the test helper based on it: . [pg_tmp](http://ephemeralpg.org/) [tmp-postgres](http://hackage.haskell.org/package/tmp-postgres) [hspec-pg-transact](http://hackage.haskell.org/package/hspec-pg-transact) provides a helper for setting up a test suite that creates a temporary process. Tests can use the optional , which adds a test and runs the db transaction used for the test. [hspec-pg-transact](http://hackage.haskell.org/package/hspec-pg-transact) postgres [itDB](https://hackage.haskell.org/package/hspec-pg-transact-0.1.0.0/docs/Test-Hspec-DB.html#v:itDB) Here is a simple example of testing db queries with a temporary database. migrate "Query” $ "work" $ do [ |INSERT INTO thingsVALUES (‘me’) |] [sql|SELECT nameFROM things |]` ` [Only "me"] describeDB itDB execute_ sql query_ shouldReturn (You need to make sure that is on the . This is case for on macOS, but for Ubuntu you must add to the ) initdb PATH brew /usr/lib/postgresql/VERSION/bin PATH The full code, including import statements, is . Let’s walk through a larger example. here Making postgresql-simple-queue In one of my previous posts, I discussed an in . The problem with the queue, as , is that it’s not . However, PostgreSQL is durable, so let’s use it to make our queue as Cale did. memory queue for sending emails Cale Gibbard pointed out durable We’ll add new payloads with . will grab the latest payload for us to process. We’ll call on the payload once the processing is finished: enqueueDB tryLockDB dequeueDB data Payload = Payload{ pId         :: PayloadId, pValue      :: Value, pState      :: State, pCreatedAt  :: UTCTime, pModifiedAt :: UTCTime} deriving (Show, Eq) enqueueDB :: Value -> DB PayloadIdenqueueDB value = dopid <- liftIO randomIOexecute[sql| INSERT INTO payloads(id, value) VALUES (?, ?)|](pid, value)return $ PayloadId pid tryLockDB :: DB (Maybe Payload)tryLockDB = listToMaybe <$> query_[sql| UPDATE payloadsSET state='locked'WHERE id in( SELECT idFROM payloadsWHERE state='enqueued'ORDER BY created_at ASCLIMIT 1)RETURNING id, value, state,created_at,modified_at|] dequeueDB :: PayloadId -> DB ()dequeueDB payloadId = void $ execute[sql| UPDATE payloadsSET state='dequeued'WHERE id=?|]payloadId All the operations occur in a monad so we can compose them with other db operations and have them run in the same transaction. For instance, we could use this library to and create a customer in a single transaction. [DB](http://hackage.haskell.org/package/pg-transact-0.1.0.0/docs/Database-PostgreSQL-Transact.html#t:DB) enqueueDB Back to Testing We can utilize to write our tests: [hspec-pg-transact](http://hackage.haskell.org/package/hspec-pg-transact) main :: IO ()main = hspec spec spec :: Specspec = describeDB init "Queue" $ doitDB "empty gives nothing" $ dotryLockDB`shouldReturn` Nothing itDB "enqueue/lock/dequeue" $ dotheId <- enqueueDB $ String "!"Just Payload {..} <- tryLockDB pId \`shouldBe\` theId  
pValue \`shouldBe\` String "!"  
tryLockDB   
  \`shouldReturn\` Nothing

dequeueDB pId \`shouldReturn\` ()  
tryLockDB   
  \`shouldReturn\` Nothing We can load up our single test file, , and run it in isolation: [test/Database/QueueSpec.hs](https://github.com/jfischoff/postgresql-queue/blob/master/test/Database/PostgreSQL/Simple/QueueSpec.hs) > :l test/Database/QueueSpec.hs> :main --match=locksDatabase.Queuepostgresql:///test?host=/tmp/tmp-postgres26345&port=57473 empty locks nothingenqueue/lock/dequeueShutting Down Finished in 1.8647 seconds2 examples, 0 failures Two seconds isn’t considered great in the unit-testing world, but for database testing we are in good shape. Not only are the tests fast, but we can also quickly iterate by reloading and rerunning a single file, all in single-digit seconds. This actually scales quite well. The queries themselves take milliseconds; almost all of the time is taken for the temporary db startup, which we only need to do once. Stress Tests Simple tests are easy, but let’s write a more complicated stress test. Unlike this simple test, the stress test will need to run multiple transactions, so we can’t use the test helper. itDB In this test we create consumer threads that read from the queue and threads that messages: 10 1000 enqueue it "stress queue" $ \testDB -> dolet withPool' = withPool testDBelemCount = 1000 :: Intexpected = [0 .. elemCount-1] ref <- newIORef [] -- Make 10 queue consumer threadsloopThreads <- replicateM 10$ async$ fix $ \next -> dompayload <- withPool' tryLockcase mpayload ofNothing -> nextJust Payload {..}  -> dolast <-atomicModifyIORef ref $\xs -> ( pValue : xs, length xs + 1)withPool' $ \conn ->dequeue conn pIdwhen (last < elemCount)next -- Fork a 1000 threads and-- enqueue an indexforM_ [0 .. elementCount - 1] $\i -> forkIO $ void $withPool' $ flip enqueue $toJSON i waitAnyCancel loopThreadsJust decoded <-mapM (decode . encode)<$> readIORef refsort decoded`shouldBe` sort expected This test works, but makes clear that there is an issue with our design. We have to poll the db constantly to see if there is new data. Going Full Postgres Luckily PostgreSQL has a solution for us, as : and . We make a new function, , to utilize PostgreSQL’s pubsub feature: lpsimth pointed out [NOTIFY](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/sql-notify.html) [LISTEN](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/sql-listen.html) lock notifyPayload :: Connection-> IO ()notifyPayload conn = doNotification {..} <-getNotification connunless (notificationChannel== "enqueue") $notifyPayload conn lock :: Connection-> IO Payloadlock conn = bracket_(Simple.execute_conn "LISTEN enqueue")(Simple.execute_conn "UNLISTEN enqueue")$ fix $ \continue -> dom <- tryLock conncase m ofNothing -> donotifyPayload conncontinueJust x -> return x We extend to also our channel after it enqueues a payload enqueueDB NOTIFY enqueue enqueueDB :: Value -> DB PayloadIdenqueueDB value = dopid <- liftIO randomIOexecute[sql| INSERT INTO payloads(id, value) VALUES (?, ?)NOTIFY enqueue;|](pid, value)return $ PayloadId pid We can write a similar test for , and our loop becomes: lock loopThreads <- replicateM 10 $async $ fix $ \next -> do-- blocks waiting for-- new payloadx <- withPool testDB locklastCount <-atomicModifyIORef ref $\xs -> ( pValue x : xs, length xs + 1)withPool testDB $ \conn ->dequeue conn (pId x)when (last < elemCount)next Much nicer (ignoring the super small margins for mobile formatting :p). The final queue is packaged up as on and . postgresql-simple-queue hackage github Fun is Hard to Write We went through a bunch of intermediate states before I pushed it to Hackage. I started with something simple, wrote stress tests, which thankfully found bugs, and added pubsub. Most incredibly, it was fun and not frustrating. Don’t take my word for it: try it. and are on Hackage/Stackage. [pg-transact](https://hackage.haskell.org/package/pg-transact) [hspec-pg-transact](https://hackage.haskell.org/package/hspec-pg-transact) Extra Credit: Email Queue Take 2 We can now write a better email process queue, discussed in my other post. First, we need a processing loop: forever $ dopayload <- withResourceconnectionPool locksendEmail payloadwithResource connectionPool $\conn -> dequeue conn(pId payload) ’s, provides this consumer loop for us and also does command line argument processing. We can make a queue consumer executable easily, like so: postgres-simple-queue [defaultMain](https://github.com/jfischoff/postgresql-queue/blob/master/src/Database/PostgreSQL/Simple/Queue/Main.hs#L133) main :: IO ()main = doenv <- newEnv DiscoverrunResourceT $ runAWS env $ defaultMain "aws-email-queue-consumer"$ \payload _ -> docase fromJSON $ pValue payload ofSuccess email -> doresp <- AWS.send $ makeEmail emaillogFailedRequest respError x -> throwIO $ userError$ "Failed to decode payload as an Email: "++ show x See for the full example. [EmailQueue](https://github.com/jfischoff/postgresql-queue/blob/master/examples/EmailQueue.hs)

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