I'm really proud of my co-founder Bruce Wilcox. He's been hard at work updating our ability to handle off topic questions with a new machine learning system that's answering almost anything that we throw at it. Combined with our highly accurate symbolic reasoning system, we are getting conversational results way beyond anything that I have ever experienced before. I can hardly contain my enthusiasm!

And today, we will begin to share it with you.. our investors. At first, invites will go out to just a few... then more and more of you. Sage, our general speech system, is not perfect but with your help as test pilots, I believe we will be the best. You will get to try Sage via five different characters:

• Mia - Mia's our automotive assistant. She's all about helping you in your car.
• Xander - He's our trade show assistant, game character and all around good nature Brit from South London. Hectic!
• Edelle - She's part cowgirl, part airport guide... sent to help travelers. Say howdy!
• Theo - He's all about your health and answering wellness question, initially in just a few areas.
• Maria - Maria loves to shop and she's here to help you source the best products on the planet.

Enjoy!

Kendall, at StartEngine, tells me that some of you that invested in SapientX have yet to hit the okay button one last time to complete your investment. If you need help, please just ping the friendly folks at SE and I'm sure they will be happy to help.

Once you do that, please get off of that computer and go enjoy some summer weather!

David Colleen

Last year, I wrote an essay on how machine learning was being used… or misused in our conversational AI world. Since then, systems like GPT3 have begun to challenge our views on the use of ML. Unlike the older ML systems, used by Amazon and Google, GPT3 seems to achieve over 90% accuracy in giving a good conversational response. The largest issues are that GPT3 is not yet open source, it only runs on a $200k computer and it needs a lot of electricity to run.

That said, as good engineers, we are taking notice and we are getting promising results in our initial tests. Our goal is to take the best of what SapientX does and have GPT3 handle what we are weakest at. I’ll share the results when we are further along.

We are also using ML to automatically determine what language people are speaking and to determine who is speaking so that our avatars can address multiple people in an audience.

These are exciting times for us and I’m happy that you are co-pilots with us on this journey!

David Colleen, CEO

2021 Essay

We know the old fairy tale. The clothes-less king has all of his subjects convinced that he is clothed in luxurious appointments… but one small boy has the nerve to point out that the king is actually naked.

Such is the case with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Broadly, artificial intelligence is any computer process that emulates how humans do things. Over the last 65 years, the AI tree has grown many useful branches of exploration. Each branch became like a unique tool in the toolbox of an AI engineer. Like any good engineer, it’s important to know which tool to use for each task. The newest tool at their disposal is machine learning.

ML has become one of the most hyped technologies in recent years. This hype has become so prevalent that I had an AI professor in Sweden tell me that if it’s not ML, it’s not AI. This is of course silly but it’s an example of how many people are drinking the hype-filled, ML Kool-aid. This is a dangerous error because ML is now being used for tasks that it’s not good at.

You may have seen the press reports about 40% of startups that claim to use AI are falsely claiming it. Well, this meme is only partially correct. To be sure, some of the companies lied about their use of AI, and some even secretly used humans in a ruse to deceive investors and customers. That said, many of the persecuted companies do use AI… but not ML. Sadly, this faulty reporting delivers a memorable message to the point that many now believe ML to be synonymous with AI. This is bad for our industry.

Machine learning is difficult to talk about because no one knows how it actually works. Machine learning is a bit like pattern recognition in that as you feed massive amounts of data into the system, it begins to recognize common patterns and their relationship to a response. Because ML is statistical, it never actually “knows” or “understands” anything… it generates a “best guess”. Consequently, ML systems generate false responses approximately 1 time in 4.

As I wrote in a previous post, conversational systems began as rule-based chatbots in the ’60s. In fact, IBM Watson, Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant, and Amazon Alexa all began as rule-based systems. All four companies now tout their systems as being ML-based. The truth is that the companies only began to add machine learning to handle user requests that the rules did not address and today, their reliance on ML varies. In benchmarks, conducted by ZDnet and Ark Invest, these voice assistants generated a significant error rate with Google at 12%, Siri at 25%, Alexa at 27%, and Watson at 29%! In our own testing, Alexa has actually declined in accuracy as they have increased the use of ML in their system over time. These error rates are consistent with typical ML performance and it’s a major limiting factor for the use of these systems. 

When Bruce Wilcox began designing what became SapientX, he ignored prevalent trends, and in a very practical approach, he focused on which AI tools worked best. He was inspired by symbolic reasoning research going on at Carnegie Mellon at the time. Symbolic reasoning is a form of rule-based AI-augmented by part of speech tagging, pattern recognition, and concept matching. Since our system analyzes inbound text like your old English teacher, we argue that, unlike ML, our system actually can understand what you say. The proof is in the results. We manually train our systems until they achieve 99% accuracy. In the wild, actual results vary. Because we can achieve these accuracies, we are a better choice for mission-critical applications such as controlling your car.

To be clear, we do use ML… for tasks that it is best at such as speech recognition, question answering, summarization, and the generation of synthetic speech. Like any good engineer, we ignore fashion and use the right tool for the task!

That's right. Our Beta test program will be launching in July. If you invest $500 or more in SapientX, you are automatically enrolled as one of our test pilots. Test pilots help us to identify strengths and weaknesses in our conversational characters so that we can make SapientX better and better. Want to be part of our exciting future... invest now. Already an investor... sit back, you will get your invite this summer as we add more and more of you to the test!

Xander's unique. I'm not just referring to his looks, his speech or the game level and characters that he keeps company with... I'm talking about that as near as we can tell... he's the first commercial use of a life sized, 3D conversational character. At Xander's launch, a few weeks ago at AWE, we made videos of people using him, but it's a bit hard to hear what was being said. I decided to just talk to him in my office with a good mic so that you could see what a conversation with him is like.

Our whole team is excited about Xander and how we are going to use his siblings to power digital signage applications. I went to InfoComm, a huge digital signage show in Las Vegas two weeks ago. Signage companies really took notice and we have begun conversations with several of them. We have also agreed to use Xander at three more shows in a few month and we are working on an airport guide name Edelle (she's kind of a cowgirl) for use at two airports. This feels big to us. Enjoy the video. David

Interview of SapientX CEO David Colleen by Dominque Wu, a consultant at Facebook. David discusses the history of high resolution character development and the next steps that the industry needs to follow to make successful conversational characters. 

SapientX had a great reception at the recent TC Mobility show in Silicon Valley. We showed Visteon Via, a digital assistant for cars. Visteon is one of the largest auto components suppliers in the world... selling to all of the major brands.

June 5, 2022 – San Francisco – SapientX <www.sapientx.com>, a leading supplier of AI powered, voice assistant software, today announced digital conversational guide characters for use in nReal glasses (Android) and the Apple glasses (iOS) platform.

SapientX CEO, David Colleen observed that “We have long supplied VR (virtual reality) solutions to our customers. Now, with the nReal glasses and new Apple glasses, we see a great way to give people a rich Metaverse experience in AR (augmented reality). Our new conversational characters can be used as guides, assistants or AI powered characters in AR based games.”. 

May 31, 2022 – San Francisco – SapientX <www.sapientx.com>, a leading supplier of AI-powered, voice assistant software, today announced life-sized digital Ambassadors for trade shows, product sales and traveler assistance. The first public use will be at the Augmented World Expo (AWE), June 2-3 in Santa Clara, California. 

SapientX CEO, David Colleen observed that “Five years ago, our team began developing an AI system that could both converse naturally and control the movements of digital humans in realistic ways. Alex Hessler (Pixar, Avatar, Harry Potter) started our high fidelity avatar program bringing character artist Jack Kim (Pacific Rim, Superman) onto the team. Last year, Epic released their new Meta-humans 3D avatar platform which we now use to deliver the highest quality brand ambassadors to our customers using the Unreal game engine.”. 

SapientX CEO, David Colleen, discusses upcoming conversational characters and how they fit into the Metaverse.

I'm happy to report that our team made a successful showing of Xander, our trade show assistant, at the AWE show last week. We believe that this is literally the first 3D, life-sized, conversational character used in a commercial setting. AWE is a game community event focused on AR and VR products. Xander and his companions are off the shelf game characters powered by SapientX AI engines that work with the Unreal and Unity game engines. This is rather a big deal as it enables other developers to add world class conversation and character animation to their apps and games. We predict big things for Xander and his siblings as they fill roles at airports, in vending machines and in retail settings. Here's some video that our team took at the show.

I believe Xander to be the very first, life-sized, talking, 3D character to be used publicly for a real use. I repeat, this is a big deal. We intend to use similar characters for retail, vending, guiding passengers at airports and so on. Xander is a very game like character as AWE is mostly for the game development community. We can use avatars that are more corporate, more cartoonish or ones that even look like famous people. I hope to show you more soon!

An interview of SapientX CEO, David Colleen by Daniel Smith of Inside.com.  David talks about how their AI system powers the voice and animation of digital characters for cars and digital signage. 

[The following is an automated notice from the StartEngine team].

Hello! Recently, a change was made to the SapientX offering. Here's an excerpt describing the specifics of the change:

Campaign has updated their financials and extended offering by 60 days

When live offerings undergo changes like these on StartEngine, the SEC requires that certain investments be reconfirmed. If your investment requires reconfirmation, you will be contacted by StartEngine via email with further instructions.

Hello SapientX Community,

It’s Webinar Day!

According to CB Insights' Industry Analyst Consensus, the metaverse could represent a $1T market by the end of the decade. https://www.cbinsights.com/research/metaverse-market-map/

David Colleen, SapientX's CEO and Co-Founder, launched the 3D Metaverse and Planet 9 Studios in 1995 and began developing AI-powered, conversational characters in 2003. He has extensive experience in the AI and VR industries. SapientX has created voice-enabled assistants that can assist you in your daily activities in both the physical and metaverse worlds as a result of his groundbreaking work.

Our voice-enabled AI technology has a conversational accuracy rate of up to 99 percent, and our assistants speak 40 different languages and dialects, allowing SapientX to reach 5.5 billion potential users. We can also function with or without the Internet!

Join us today May 26, 2022, for this exclusive event! You can register here.

Learn why your best investment in the physical and metaverse world could very well be SapientX, thanks to their game-changing Voice Enabling AI technology. 

Join the journey to $2M on StartEngine! If you're on the fence about investing, I recommend you attend this FREE webinar.

Warmly,
David Colleen
CEO & Co-Founder

Hello SapientX Community, 

One day left to register!

According to CB Insights' Industry Analyst Consensus, the metaverse could represent a $1T market by the end of the decade. https://www.cbinsights.com/research/metaverse-market-map/ 

David Colleen, SapientX's CEO and Co-Founder, launched the 3D Metaverse and Planet 9 Studios in 1995 and began developing AI-powered, conversational characters in 2003. He has extensive experience in the AI and VR industries. SapientX has created voice-enabled assistants that can assist you in your daily activities in both the physical and metaverse worlds as a result of his groundbreaking work.

Our voice-enabled AI technology has a conversational accuracy rate of up to 99 percent, and our assistants speak 40 different languages and dialects, allowing SapientX to reach 5.5 billion potential users. We can also function with or without the Internet!

Join us tomorrow May 26, 2022, for this exclusive event! You can register here.

Learn why your best investment in the physical and metaverse world could very well be SapientX, thanks to their game-changing Voice Enabling AI technology. 

Join the journey to $2M on StartEngine! If you're on the fence about investing, I recommend you attend this FREE webinar.

Warmly,
David Colleen
CEO & Co-Founder

Today, we had our 2,000th StartEngine investor join the SapientX team. We are pleased and appreciative of your support. Thank you. David

Hello SapientX Community, 

Using A.I. to Bring a Voice & Intelligence to the Metaverse 

The metaverse could represent a $1T market by the end of the decade, according to CB Insights’ Industry Analyst Consensus: https://www.cbinsights.com/research/metaverse-market-map/ 

David Colleen, SapientX's CEO & Co-founder, is a serial AI and VR entrepreneur, who founded 3D Metaverse and Planet 9 Studios (1995) and began building AI-powered conversational characters in 2003. His pioneering experience helped lead to the development of SapientX’s voice-enabling AI today that could help navigate your daily life in the physical and metaverse worlds.

SapientX can reach 5.5 billion potential users with our voice-enabling AI technology, which has a conversational accuracy rate of up to 99 percent, and our assistants speak 40 different languages and dialects. We can also operate with or without the Internet! 

 Join us on May 26 for this exclusive event! You can register here.

 Learn why your best investment in the physical and metaverse world could very well be SapientX, thanks to their game-changing Voice Enabling AI technology. 

Become a part of our mission to $1.5M on StartEngine! If you're on the fence about investing, I recommend you attend this FREE webinar. 

Warmly,
David Colleen
CEO & Co-Founder

Hello SapientX Community, 

SapientX reaches $1.5M Milestone on StartEngine 

We are ecstatic to announce we have reached our first $1.5M+ in investments!

Our investors are the best. Thank you so much for supporting the SapientX vision and helping us to reach our financial goals.  We are working hard to be worthy of your investment. 

Intelligent, interactive, human-like avatars and revolutionary interactive speech are among the many AI-enabled innovations developed here at SapientX. Avatars that can converse with the user like a best friend and - even more impressively – they can learn from the user's voice data and needs.

Seeing so many people across the country rally around our Voice Enabling AI technology shows that we're on the verge of becoming a major player in a wide range of industries.

On a personal note, several of you have doubled down by writing me with offers to make business connections for us. Extending our network and exposing us to potential customers or partners is super helpful to a startup. You can always contact me via the link on our website. I respond to all emails personally.

We're overwhelmed by your generosity, and we hope you'll stick around to see how far we can take this historic raise!

We encourage all previous investors to reinvest and learn more on StartEngine!

Warmly,
David Colleen
CEO & Co-Founder

Hello SapientX Community,

See our next generation of VOICE AI Dashboard at the TechCrunch Mobility 2022 Event,  from May 18-19, in Booth #SB2.

We invite you to stop by and view our latest virtual automotive assistants at the TechCrunch Mobility 2022 Event in San Mateo, California, in Silicon Valley on May 18-19, 2022. 

Click here to purchase tickets for the event! 

(https://techcrunch.com/events/tc-sessions-mobility-2022/) 

Be on the lookout for booth #SB2!

We can’t wait to show you the next generation of AI Voice Assistants for automobiles!

At SapientX, we offer an alternative AI voice system that allows you to smoothly chat with your technology products as if you were talking to your best friend!

Our products understand up to 99% of requests, speak 40 languages, work both on and offline, and carefully protect the user’s data.

We’re making friends all over: some of the companies we partner with a range from world-famous auto and motorcycle companies to companies that offer digital signage, teleconferencing systems, vending machines, and more.

What are you waiting for?  Join SapientX as an early shareholder today on StartEngine, and we hope to see you at the show!

Warmly,

David Colleen

CEO & Co-Founder

In two weeks, we will be exhibiting at AWE, the biggest show of the year for AR, VR and Metaverse developers. At the show, we will be demonstrating how our voice software can power NPC's (non player characters) in games and other metaverse application. The scene below shows Xander and his two lady friends Blade and Kitten in an off the shelf game level. All three characters demonstrate how our system works with any standard game character to add conversational abilities and human-like animation. Xander is an Epic Meta-Human, Blade is a stock UE4 character and Kitten was made in Maya, purchased on Turbosquid and inserted into this Unreal game level. Nice... hunh? We think our friends at AWE will think so too. If you can come to the show... write me for a 20% ticket discount. Cheers. DC

Hello SapientX Community, 

We will be attending the TechCrunch Mobility 2022 Event,  from May 18-19, in Booth #SB2.

We invite you to stop by and view our latest virtual automotive assistants at the TechCrunch Mobility 2022 Event at San Mateo, California, in Silicon Valley on May 18-19, 2022.

Click here to purchase tickets for the event!
(https://techcrunch.com/events/tc-sessions-mobility-2022/)

Be on the lookout for booth #SB2!

We can’t wait to show you the next generation of AI Voice Assistants for automobiles!

At SapientX, we offer an alternative AI voice system that allows you to smoothly chat with your technology products as if you were talking to your best friend!

Our products understand up to 99% of requests, speak 40 languages, work both on and offline, and carefully protect the user’s data.

We’re making friends all over: some of the companies we partner with range from world-famous auto and motorcycle companies to companies that offer digital signage, teleconferencing systems, vending machines, and more.

What are you waiting for? Join SapientX as an early shareholder today on StartEngine, and we hope to see you at the show!

Warmly,
David Colleen
CEO & Co-Founder

Hello SapientX Community,

The digital advertising market is expected to be $27.8 Billion in the US alone by 2026.
Learn how investing in SapientX can help us add Voice AI and avatars to a new generation of highly personalized brand ambassadors for ad campaigns.

Join us for a “fireside chat” with Barney Stacher, of Stacher & Stacher, New York advertising and branding firm, and David Colleen, SapientX’s CEO. Discover how Fortune 500 firms will utilize conversational, conversational speech AI to communicate with clients in their worldwide marketplaces and provide them with personalized attention, as if they were their best friends.

 In one day, join Barney and David on May 13th, at 2:00 PM Pacific Time, for their exclusive webinar about digital advertising trends using Voice AI and answer your investment questions.

We’re looking forward to you joining us, you don’t want to miss this exclusive event! You may register here

Become a part of our mission to $1.5M on StartEngine! If you're on the fence about investing, I recommend you attend this FREE webinar.


Warmly,
David Colleen
CEO & Co-Founder

Hello SapientX Community, 

The digital advertising market is expected to be $27.8 Billion in the US alone by 2026.

Learn how investing in SapientX can help us add Voice AI and avatars to a new generation of highly personalized brand ambassadors for ad campaigns. 

Join us for a “fireside chat” with Barney Stacher, of Stacher & Stacher, New York advertising and branding firm, and David Colleen, SapientX’s CEO. Learn how and why Fortune 500 companies will use friendly, conversational voice AI to interact with customers in their global markets, while giving them personal attention, like a best friend.     

In one week join Barney and David on May 13th, at 2:00 PM Pacific Time, for their exclusive webinar about digital advertising trends using Voice AI and answer your investment questions.

You may register here!    

We are so close to $1.5M on StartEngine! If you're on the fence about investing, I recommend you attend this FREE webinar.

Warmly,

David Colleen

CEO & Co-Founder

In 1996, I was invited to pitch a prior company to investors at the first-ever venture conference in San Francisco. In the room next to me was a guy named Jeff pitching an online book store. I remember thinking that Jeff’s book store was not very compelling when all of the other presenters were talking about their cool new technologies. At the end of the event, Jeff and his bookstore were voted to be the most likely to succeed… because they were the only company presenting “that had an actual business model”!

I was dumbfounded… and perhaps the most wrong that I have ever been in my life. Some of you may have already guessed that Jeff’s book store was Amazon. Jeff went on to invent online retailing and he became, for a time, the wealthiest man in the world. Bravo.
Amazon has some secrets. You will never guess how they make their money. A friend in senior management told me that their biggest profits come from the interest that they gather by not paying their vendors for 90 days!

They have another secret, Alexa exists solely to come into your home to study you, collect your personal data, and sell it to the highest bidder. Amazon is not alone in this practice. All of the major voice assistants also see you as a crop as they harvest your personal data.

We think this is wrong. Many of our customers agree, saying that they come to us specifically because we don’t sell this data. Our assistant does learn about users… but only to serve them better. Since we can run offline, we can keep this data locally, where it’s easiest to protect. The times are changing and we believe that eventually, the other companies will need to follow our lead.

We will be showing our latest automotive assistants at the TechCrunch Mobility 2022 in San Mateo, California in Silicon Valley (https://techcrunch.com/events/tc-sessions-mobility-2022/) on May 18-19, 2022.  Please visit us at booth #SB2 !

Hello SapientX Community 

The modern world is always in motion, ever-changing. Growing up, we were promised jet packs, holodecks and Mr. Data. Well, we are not quite there and it seems that the future needs a bit of a push from us. Here at SapientX, we are committed to becoming the force that will realize that change: our game changing AI technology will bring us into the future! 

Our voice technology already has conversational accuracy of up to 99 percent, and our AI-enabled assistants speak 40 different languages and dialects. This is the foundation on which we will build a community:  a world of 5.5 billion potential users connected through our technology.

SapientX's AI-enabled innovations include human-like avatars, revolutionary interactive speech, and many more. Imagine avatars that can converse with a user and even learn from their needs and preferences, kind of like your best friend would. These are not science fiction dreams: they are real, and we are bringing them to a waiting world.

Thanks to our cutting-edge artificial intelligence, you’ll never need to memorize voice commands again: chatting with our AI is like conversing with a digital brain that adapts to your every need.

To enable natural language communication, our avatars make use of the latest in symbolic logic and machine learning that will forever change the digital landscape. 

Join Our Investor Community on StartEngine Today!

We need the support of our community to help us make an impact. Visit our StartEngine raise page and join us as an early shareholder today! If you have any questions that have been left unanswered, please do not hesitate to contact me via our website. 

Thank you in advance for your support!

Warmly,

David Colleen

CEO & Co-Founder

Occasionally investors send me direct emails asking questions about SapientX. While I'm happy to answer emails, these answer needs to be shared with all potential investors.

Q - Is all the Regulations ( for now lets take US & Europe) been taken care of since they can control success when it comes to the development of technology and future use

A - Our software has little regulation. Our customers, who use our software in their products, are responsible for addressing regulations as they pertain to their products and sales local.

Q - Example European legal framework for AI to address safety risks specific to the AI systems are to be released fully this year if i am correct. is the product in compliance?

A - These appear to just be draft requirements. We will evaluate regulations when they become law. Our current software can meet existing laws.

Q - Need your comments on this with reference to  the product developed the European Commission has proposed 3 inter related legal initiatives that will contribute to building trustworthy AI in 2022 and beyond.

A - We will not speculate on the impacts of things that are not law. In general, we are against the current practice of other AI companies that harvest and sell sensitive user data.

Q - Understand the product saves data local & does not need internet. Is there any future plans to provide cloud services & team up with Azure OR Google cloud?

A - SapientX software already runs online or offline. Most of our servers use Amazon AWS.

Q - Is the product fully completed OR is there any future scope for improvement? Can I expect the product to evolve & update, new features included in the future product releases?

A - Our software is ready to be used. Our customers often ask for help in customizing it to their specific needs. We update the software as needed and to adapt to shifting market needs and opportunities.

Q - Is there any other exciting future plans of the product and is it possible to include some technical insights OR information OR hints?

A - We don't discuss new products prematurely. That said, our team is excited about new things that we will be sharing soon.

Q - IS it possible to team up with you to provide some technical ideas and product application plans

A - Yes, we have partnered with several industry partners to extend our sales and marketing reach.

Q - Why is SapientX voice assistant not known in the market?

A - We are known in the markets that we have focused on.

Hello SapientX Community,

SapientX is developing the next generation of artificial intelligence voice assistants for the physical and metaverse worlds. SapientX has worked with friends who make cars, robots, and all sorts of consumer products including Volvo, LG, Yamaha, NEC, and Mitsubishi.

The combination of helpful humanoid avatars and conversational Voice AI with up to 99% accuracy distinguishes SapientX as the best in our field.

What would be the point of all of this if we can’t share it with the world?

That is why I will be hosting an exclusive investor Q&A webinar on April 29th, 1:00 PM Pacific Time! 

There’s less than 1 week left, so sign up today!

The webinar will break down who we are, showcase what we have been working on, and most importantly, answer all your burning investment questions! 

If you have been on the fence about committing your investment, I suggest you should take advantage of this FREE webinar.

You can register for the webinar on Zoom here.

We encourage everyone to spread the word to their network about investing and joining this exclusive online event!

Warmly,

David Colleen

CEO & Co-Founder

Hello SapientX Community, 👋

SapientX has created a voice assistant powered by AI (artificial intelligence) that can interact with users as if it were their best friend. Today, we are working with companies that make cars, appliances, smart home devices and vending machines to voice-enable a new generation of products.

What would be the point of all of this if we can’t share it with the world!

That is why I will be hosting an exclusive investor Q&A webinar April 29th, 1:00 PM Pacific Time!

There’s less than 2 weeks left so sign up today!

The webinar will break down who we are, showcasing what we have been working on and more importantly, answering all your burning investment questions! 

If you have been on the fence about committing your investment, I suggest you should take advantage of this FREE webinar.

You can register for the webinar on Zoom here.

We encourage everyone to spread the word to their network about investing and joining this exclusive online event!

Warmly,

David Colleen

CEO & Co-Founder

I'll be speaking at the excellent VON3 Web 3.0 virtual conference (https://www.von3.xyz/) on April 27th, 2022 at 12:40 pm PST. My topic is "Bringing a Voice & Intelligence to the Metaverse". Please join me!

Last year, the animator of our Hazel the cat character, Andranik Tigranyan, had to be evacuated as his village was under threat of being shelled by Russia backed Azerbaijani forces. Luckily, after a few weeks, Andranik was able to return to his home and his work with us. So sad.

Again, this year, one of our artists in Lviv, Ukraine, Alex Labuschevskyy, is doing his best to keep working under the constant threat of Russian attack. Our hearts go out to Alex and his family. When will this madness end?

I ask myself what we can do to help. Yes, we can send money to relief agencies… which of course is useful and important. We have also decided that an even more direct way to help is to make it clear to people like Alex that we are behind them and that we will continue to keep them busy with work so that they can continue to feed their families and support their local economy. The World Bank estimates that the war will shrink the Ukraine economy by 45%. If you can help… please do. Peace.

Five years ago, there were 400 new chatbot startups, each promising that they would revolutionize retail, customer support, and ordering pizza. Last year, almost all of these companies had failed or they had pivoted. In CB Insights report “Lessons From The Failed Chatbot Revolution” they report that Facebook and Google had both implemented chatbots for customer service but in the end, they had mostly abandoned them in favor of live support people. 

I get that because I have never had a useful chatbot experience. Here’s why. 

A.I. (artificial intelligence) turned 65 this year. Chatbots, a branch of AI study, are now 55 years old because Joseph Weizenbaum’s Eliza (the first chatbot) was launched in 1966 from MIT’s A.I. Lab. Eliza was a text-to-text, word matching bot requiring a user to type a statement and if Eliza could match the words in the statement to words in a script, it would return a pre-written response. In 2005, a Javascript version of Eliza was released by Norbert Landsteiner and it can be found here http://www.masswerk.at/eliza/.

In 1995, Richard Wallace launched Alice, written in XML-based AIML (artificial intelligence markup language). AIML was easy to use and developed a huge following. The AIML-like conversation became the backbone of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) phone systems. Say the keyword… get a response. Today's modern chatbots have evolved very little from Eliza 55 years ago and knowing this is the key to understanding why they work so poorly. A chatbot will never have any understanding of what you say.

When my co-founder, Bruce Wilcox, began designing our present system, he knew that we would have to go beyond simple chatbots. He wanted a system that could analyze natural conversation to extract the true message that a user was trying to convey. He found the answer in the branch of A.I. science called symbolic reasoning. We later improved on this by adding machine learning components where it made sense.

When SapientX hears a user speak, it converts the audio to text with a speech recognition system. This text is then analyzed the way your English teacher taught you to break sentences down into verbs, nouns, etc. From this, we use a form of pattern recognition to match the sentence to common patterns. This is also computationally very efficient because one line of code may handle 1,000 variations of how someone might ask for something. This same approach also allows us to handle complex statements, understand user sentiment, and customize an appropriate response. SapientX also learns about a user in order to serve them better. That text response is then converted to spoken audio. All this happens in a few milliseconds.

At this point, you may be asking how can SapientX be better than the much-touted machine learning systems that Google and Apple use. The first answer is that they were designed for different tasks so a direct comparison is unfair. The second answer is that Google, on its best day, scores only 88% (Apple gets 75%) accuracy according to ZDnet while when I speak to SapientX, I’m able to reach up to 99% accuracy in narrow domain use. I’ll explain why the tech giant systems fail in future posts. 

We are happy to announce that Santa Cruz based, Patricia "Patti" Guard , has joined our team as a business administrator. Patti started life as a financial analyst for NCR In Cincinnati. In more recent times, she had an epic career in software sales with Dassault and Siemens and in more recent days, she worked in marketing for the non-profit world. We look forward to working with Patti and making use of her deep business experience to propel SapientX!

SapientX Community,

We are constantly evolving. It’s natural that the way we interact with our technology evolves too.

Imagine voice AI technology that responds like a person. Technology that understands human conversation and communicates interactively with you. Our innovative AI is like a digital brain that constantly adapts to your needs and talks to you like a friend so that you never have to learn voice commands.

In order for conversational AI to work, we need to be able to buy into the AI as a full conversational partner. It needs to feel like we are speaking with a person, not a machine.

At SapientX, we have developed a revolutionary and proprietary interactive voice, alongside animated human-like avatars, powered by artificial intelligence. Our conversational, friendly avatars learn from the user’s voice data and needs, enabling it to talk naturally with the user like a best friend.

Why invest in SapientX’s voice enabling AI? We have a few good reasons:

• Our voice enabling AI technology is more accurate than Alexa and Siri, at up to 99% conversational accuracy as opposed to Amazon and Apple's 75% and 72.5%, respectively (ZDnet).

• Our voice enabled characters speak 40 languages and dialects, covering 5.5 billion potential users. They can also work with or without a connection to the Internet, keeping data local and secure.

• We have delivered voice AI prototypes (with or without character avatars) to international corporations such as Mitsubishi, Yamaha, Murakami, NEC, Haier, KTM and more than 20 other companies.

• The voice AI market is seeing exponential growth, projected to reach $31.82 billion by 2025 with a CAGR of 43.7%.

• SapientX co-founder, Bruce Wilcox used previous versions of our voice-enabling AI technology to win the prestigious Loebner Prize four times.

We are making voice-enabled technology available to the masses by working closely with companies to add voice and intelligence to products such as cars, appliances, smart home devices and vending machines.

With your support, you’re not just an investor, you’re at the tip of the spear!

To join our community of 3,000+ early shareholders, visit our StartEngine raise page and invest today.

Warmly,

David Colleen

CEO & Co-Founder

David@SapientX.com

I'll be speaking at the excellent Conversational Interaction conference (https://www.conversationalinteraction.com/) on April 12th, 2022 at 10 am. My topic is "Giving a Brain and a Voice to Life Sized Digital Characters". Please join me!

I'm happy to report that yesterday, we smashed the million dollar mark with over 1,300 investors! Thank you to all of you have have backed the SapientX vision and especially to those of your who have invested multiple times with us. To stay in better touch with you, we just launched a new blog site at blog.sapientx.com. I'll be making posts talking about technology, SapientX news and our fund raising progress. Please visit us there. Cheers.... David Colleen, CEO

In short... no... but we are getting closer. Don't get me wrong... my team has been building VR apps since you were a baby, but the truth is, only early adopters are willing to wear the clunky headsets. Samsung finally learned this lesson and shut down their Gear VR headset group in 2021. Officially, they said that they are “rethinking their immersive video distribution method, especially given that Gear VR is no longer available.”

The end beginning is near.

Today's VR headsets are "VR 3.0". VR 1.0 (1984) was built by hearty pioneers and millions of dollars of DARPA contracts. Yes, they had headsets, but they were only ever used by a handful of people.

Pioneer Jaron Lanier in a VPL Headset, courtesy BBC

The VR 2.0 (1995) people (myself included) wanted to bring VR to the masses and they believed that the web and a desktop computer were the ideal medium for this. They even banded together and created an open standard for web based VR, called VRML, and made plugins that worked with the major web browsers of the day. This was all great until the major backers (Netscape, SGI and Microsoft) packed their bags in search of shinier objects to promote.

VR 2.0 - Black Sun Pointworld

VR 3.0 began with the Oculus Rift in 2012. This may have gone unnoticed except that Facebook bought the small company for a very large sum. Overnight, VR was all the rage and shows like AWE (Augmented World Expo) filled their tent with shiny new exhibitors chanting "build it and they will come". Mostly, they did not come. In fact, most of the money made went to the porn industry.

Why I believe that VR will finally succeed in 2022

Sometimes, the bones of technology pioneers need to be stacked up for several generations of development before the tech is finally ready for a broad audience. I saw a glimmer of hope, in 2020, with the announcement of the nReal AR glasses... finally arriving in the US in 2021 for about $500. Compared to the clunky headsets, these glasses are fabulous. Compared to what consumers need, they are just a tech preview.

nReal glasses, courtesy UploadVR

What they got right is excellent resolution and light weight. I can actually watch a full movie with these on. Where they fail a consumer is with the cable... attached to your Android phone (sorry Apple fans) and the small number of compelling apps.

Okay, so who will take the ball over the goal line? Apple. The team in Cupertino has been sharpening their knives for a long time preparing to claim the XR market (the industry term for both AR and VR) for their own. June 7th, 2022, they will begin to lay out their game plan for us during their yearly developer conference. Apple plan's to collect your credit card number in time for Christmas.

Will they succeed? Yes... kind of. They have a lot tied up in this but it looks like what they will ship this year is essentially a developers model with the good, consumer level stuff coming in 2025. Where they will succeed is in showing you excellent apps, exciting demos and compelling TV ads. Like all Apple products in recent times, it will be buggy. (My Apple speakers and ear buds still don't work as advertised.)

If you love VR, as I do, this is excellent and long awaited news. Even better... our team can hardly wait to have our conversational characters populate the newest version of the Metaverse!

Our investors are the best. Thank you so much for supporting the SapientX vision and helping us to reach our financial goals. We are working hard to be worthy of your investment!

Our system has long supported the ability to answer questions from online data sources such as Wikipedia. This data is somewhat easy to use as the data is partially formatted and structured making it possible to answer a question such as “Who was our 23rd President?”. 

What’s much more difficult is answering questions from unstructured data such as the driver’s manual of a car or the business records of a company. The manual training of an A.I. system to deal with this type of data can be daunting. One of our automotive customers told us that they maintain 400 different auto manuals all requiring yearly updates in multiple languages. 

Luckily, there is a field of machine learning research focused on question answering research. Unfortunately, doing an automated search in real-time, so that it can be used in a conversation, is a real challenge. I’m happy to report that our team has been hard at work on this and with parallel processing approaches, we are now able to answer questions from typical business documents. Having this capability is deeply useful.

Here’s a dramatically, unexciting video of it in action! https://youtu.be/bcLuyK6xpnU

We are really bowled over by the strong support that we have received from the Start Engine investor community. We just passed 1,000 investors and $800k of investment. Thank you so very much.

On a personal note, several of you have doubled down by writing me with offers to make business connections for us. Extending our network and exposing us to potential customers or partners is super helpful to a startup. You can always contact me via the link on our website. I respond to all emails personally. Thank you.

David Colleen, CEO

Henry Ford once said, before he invented the Model T, " If I had asked people then what they wanted, they would have answered, 'We want faster horses ".

Automakers are faced with a similar dilemma when choosing voice assistants for their cars. Most cars, in the US, ship with a voice interface, and most of these systems are made by Cerence.  JD Powers says that these systems only answer user requests correctly 37% of the time. Consequently, only about 10% of drivers use these systems.

It’s no wonder that car companies are beginning to replace these systems with Alexa and Google Assistant. They do so despite the following problems:

1. Amazon and Google need an internet connection to work.

2. They demand that their brand and wake word be used.

3. They insist on collecting sensitive user data that they sell to others.

4. Google Assistant and Alexa speak less than 20 languages.

5. They worry that they will lose control to the powerful tech giants.

To keep these tech giants at bay, the car makers are largely constraining their voice assistants to music, trivia, and navigation… with a firewall preventing them from accessing other car functions.

What About Android Auto or Apple CarPlay?

Both of these products are designed to “cast” your mobile phone screen onto your car's infotainment screen. This is great for music and messages but it does not allow for deeper, system-level functionality.

The SapientX Solution

In our experience, a conversational AI combined with an avatar that understands a user's emotion and responds to them conversationally yields a much higher level of user satisfaction and trust than older, command-based voice systems. Here’s why our platform is better:

• Internet - SapientX works with or without an internet connection.

• Brand - We support a car company's brand experience, assistant personality, and wake word choice. Our system is so flexible that the user can select their avatar and wake word!

• Sensitive User Data - We don’t sell user data. Period. 

• Security - Any user data that we collect is stored locally, encrypted and only used to improve the user experience.

• Control - We are here to support car companies… not compete with their interests.

• Functionality - Volvo tells us that we are the only voice system that can integrate into the nervous system of a car to control all user functions. 

Some carmakers are hitting the “easy button” by adopting Amazon and Google products. Luckily for us, smarter car companies have the vision to, like Henry Ford, deliver a superior voice assistant experience that’s beyond anything that drivers have dreamed exists.  We are on a mission to deliver that experience.

A dirty secret of the Internet is that it takes an incredible amount of power to run. Even worse are the machine learning (ML) systems that churn away on high-performance server farms to fuel our present A.I. revolution.

Over the last two years, global warming and forest fires, here in California, have hurt our Santa Cruz operation for, on average, two weeks per year. The impact is so serious that we have invested in making the facility 100% solar-powered with enough battery capacity to run without the sun for almost two weeks. (At no cost to SapientX.)

Most A.I. startups run their machine learning systems on Amazon AWS servers. Complex training sessions can run around the clock for months on end! When our monthly Amazon bill exceeded $1,000, we began looking for alternatives. (Yes, I’m frugal.) We decided to set up new ML servers in-house to save quite a bit of money.

I wish I could say that this was by grand design… but now we can lay some sort of claim to being one of the first “Green” A.I. companies. This makes me happy… and I hope it does you as well!

It's great to get this important recognition from the Tech Tribune https://thetechtribune.com/best-tech-startups-in-santa-cruz !

We are happy to announce that Tokyo based, Junichi Fujita, has joined our team as a senior engineer. Junichi is the author of our avatar display engine and we have enjoyed working with him over the past six years at his last company. His new mission is to begin upgrades to Sage to make her even more interactive and lifelike. We look forward to more great things from Junichi!

I'm happy to report that Visteon Via was a big hit at CES last month. Visteon (a huge auto parts supplier) had their own ballroom at the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas. They were showing a number of advanced technologies demos that they hope to bring to your family car in the coming years. CES is just the start of their yearly marketing campaigns. Next stops for this road show include General Motors and Ford.

Our part in this demo was to produce the display screens and a series of talking avatars for the user to select from. Functions included reading emails, answering calls and directing the driver to their next coffee stop. We predict great things for Visteon Via!

We just received some excellent press from Electronic Design magazine. Here's a video interview with Senior Content Director, Bill Wong and SapientX CEO, David Colleen in an article called "Avatars Are For More Than Just the Metaverse". 

I'm happy to report that we had a successful showing at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas last week. We featured our newest high-resolution character Sage who can sell, inform and act as a brand ambassador. Sage generated a lot of interest especially with retailers. You can see her in action here. SapientX Sage @ CES 2022

Mitsubishi Mia by Adi DiPierro

Have you ever had a Zoom call with someone who refused to turn their video on? To me… it feels like something is missing. I think most of us have heard the old adage that “70% of all human communication is non-verbal”. That is, as we speak, we are also communicating with our faces, hands, and body pose. It stands to reason that communicating without this visual data is incomplete communication. 

To understand how to make the best voice assistant, it was important to also understand the value of using an avatar. We began by gathering all of the best research spanning the last twenty years. We have summarized this in our white paper called Avatars 101. I invite you to download a copy here https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kIwupzvUO-OfCJYPtlOq2qM0zyu_cIja/view?usp=sharing

Sage, a Meta-Human Avatar Powered by SapientX's A.I. Software

Arguably, our early team built the first online version of the Metaverse. We were captivated by Gibson’s “Neuromancer” (1984) and Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” (1992) science fiction novels. Gibson described virtual worlds made up of abstract data visualizations. In contrast, Stephenson wrote about highly realistic places and characters… so real that it could be difficult to tell the difference between real and virtual. Then in 1999, the first “Matrix” movie came out merging the two visions in a thrilling and disturbing version of a possible future vision of humanity's destiny. 

Our first version of the 3D Metaverse was VirtualSOMA in 1995. It was the first “world” that you could visit in a web browser. We were assisted by many friends including Barb Singer, Mark Pesce, Tony Parisi and Owen Rowley. Soon after launch, our site was hacked by talented programmers in San Francisco who added avatars and text chat. The Metaverse was born.

Over the years, many more metaverses followed including Black Sun’s “Point World”, “Onlive”, “Second Life” and more recently “Roblox”... each learning from the last and gaining the ability to engage visitors. This year, with the help of Facebook and the press, the Metaverse has been reborn or as the Wachowski’s term it, “Matrix Resurrections”.

If this history has taught us anything, it’s that a vibrant Metaverse needs great characters that visitors can interact with. SapientX’s focus has always been on giving an excellent voice interface to other peoples’ products. Since studies showed a truly superior user experience, when avatars were coupled with a voice, we began to connect to third party avatar systems to make it easy for our customers to add avatars. Today, we support WebGL, Unity and Unreal with their Meta-humans system making it relatively easy for new Metaverse builders to add compelling, conversational characters to their worlds.

Many years ago, I was invited to pitch a prior company to investors at the first-ever venture conference in San Francisco. In the room next to me was a guy named Jeff pitching an online book store. I remember thinking that Jeff’s book store was not very compelling when all of the other presenters were talking about their cool new technologies. At the end of the event, Jeff and his bookstore were voted to be the most likely to succeed… because they were the only company presenting “that had an actual business model”!

I was dumbfounded… and perhaps the most wrong that I have ever been in my life. Some of you may have already guessed that Jeff’s book store was Amazon. Jeff went on to invent online retailing and he became, for a time, the wealthiest man in the world. Bravo.

Amazon has a not so secret, secret... Alexa exists solely to come into your home to study you, collect your personal data, and sell it to the highest bidder. Amazon is not alone in this practice. All of the major voice assistants also see you as a crop as they harvest your personal data.

We think this is wrong. Many of our customers agree, saying that they come to us specifically because we don’t sell this data. Our assistant does learn about users… but only to serve them better. Since we can run offline, we can keep this data locally, where it’s easiest to protect. The times are changing and we believe that eventually, the other companies will need to follow our lead.

I would like to share some great news with you. Two months ago, Visteon asked us to work with them on developing an innovative automotive dashboard experience featuring a new assistant, Visteon “Via”. Visteon is the largest auto parts supplier of infotainment systems in the US and they can help bring our software to all of the large auto makers. They currently supply Ford, Renault/Nissan, Mazda, BMW, GM, Honda, PSA, JLR, VW and Daimler. Visteon will be publicly showing Via at their CES pavilion at the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas January 5-8.

BTW, if you are coming to CES, please visit our booth (8470) in the North Hall. We will be showing several of our assistants including Sage, a life sized conversational Meta-human. Happy Holidays!

In 2018, IEEE published the landmark study, What People See in 157 Robot Faces https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/what-people-see-in-157-robot-faces . For years, my friends who make robots, all told me that robots should have abstract representations of human features. It turns out that this group-think was entirely wrong. In the study, it was shown that people actually prefer to talk with robots that have human-like features.

My friend Brian Eberman, the CTO for the Jibo Robot, told me that once they began to analyze the use logs for their robots, they found something very surprising… 60% of all conversation with their robot was purely conversational. “How are you?” “What a beautiful day!” This underscores just how social we all are and that we crave conversation… even with a robot.

Interestingly, the National Highway Traffic Safety Association found that the most successful voice assistants, in cars, were mimicking human conversation. They found that once people felt that the assistant had conversational skills, that they would name the assistant and personify their interaction experience resulting in higher user satisfaction scores and less driver distraction.

At SapientX, we have taken this research to heart. While the use of avatars is always optional for our customers, once they review the research, almost all of them choose to use an avatar along with a SapientX voice experience in their product. It would seem that indeed… a picture really may be worth a thousand words!

The SEC likes us to make sure that we provide the same information to all investors so I'll occasionally be sharing some messages and responses sent directly to us. We have always been fully transparent with our investors and have stayed in steady contact with them. Some have become close friends of SapientX and have generated business leads for us. We see your involvement as an asset... not a burden. Thank you to those of you who have stayed by our side and helped us! David Colleen, CEO

Q - I have used Start Engine previously & am a current investor. I think that was a great move since they have a huge following! I will probably invest again, with Sapient,  since I love how you are a straight shooter & have a great vision of where the company is heading. Just a quick side note, I never received a t-shirt.

A (David Colleen) - We sent out several emails asking people to confirm their shipping address. Many did not respond. If I may have your address, I’ll make sure that you get your shirt.

Q  - Hi David, thanks for the update!  I hope you are doing well. All of this may be on startengine, which I have not yet had time to review, but what are the valuation and terms under which you are currently raising funds, and how do they differ from your most recent campaign in Wefunder?  

A (David Colleen) - The terms are largely the same except that Start Engine could not have a fractional share value so we rounded it up to the nearest cent. The market cap is the same as last time plus the money raised at Wefunder.

Q - Hi, I wonder why you are raising more money now - are the money from the investors from the previous round already spent? What have those money gone to? I see that there are gifts for the new investors, maybe i have bad memory - shall i not get gift from my previous investment?

A (David Colleen) - Thanks for investing in us. Our last raise was for working capital to carry us past our customer delays caused by Covid. While business has started to resume, we are still not past all of the Covid and related supply chain issues. This has forced us to raise more money to bring us to our first strong customer revenues.

Last year and the first half of this year were awful for sales. Customers were not responding. We used the time productively to take advantage of new market segments created because of Covid such as voice enabled vending machines, an assistant for Zoom and other teleconferencing systems and life-sized assistants for digital signage in retail and transportation systems. We also completed patent submissions for the US, Japan and International patent offices.

Sorry if you didn’t receive your gift. We sent out several emails asking for address confirmation. Many people did not respond, and some emails bounced. Some of the packages that were sent were returned to us. Some investors asked for gifts, but they had not invested the amounts needed for those gifts. Please send me your address and I’ll make sure that you gift is sent.

Q - Is there any info on how you see your biz dev efforts translating into revenue, and timeframe, etc?  Ie what is a realistic pro-forma if, say, you raise a min of $1mm?  

A (David Colleen) - I hate to make excuses, but Covid and related issues have made it difficult to generate projections. Our revenue goals are $500k for 2022. Ordinarily, this would be a pretty achievable but there are a number of economic factors that could create new headwinds. The good news is that David Urbanic has returned to head sales and Emily Troutner just agreed to head marketing. Now, it’s up to them to execute. We have a solid product and it just needs to be sold.

Q - Understand, but if the product is compelling, should be able to find some revenue opportunities with shorter lead times than vehicle integration, etc?

How are Urbanic and Troutner being compensated?  What does the expense side of the ledger look like on a monthly basis, and how do you see that changing over the next 12 months?

A (David Colleen) - Yes, vehicles are a long lead. That’s why we expanded to some other markets in 2020. We have written a number of proposals in health, appliances, consumer electronics, vending and digital signage. Most of these markets have 6-24 month product cycles. Given the current market climate, we have to push hard to get our software to ship in our customers products. That’s our 2022 focus.

I’m happy to discuss company finance at a macro level but we do not disclose individual compensation levels. Our Board keeps a close watch on compensation and please be assured that we do salary surveys to determine normal market ranges for startup level compensation. Most of our monthly burn goes to paying our team, followed by legal expenses focused on patent and funding activities.

As we gain business, we will need to ramp up our labor to support that new business. Much of our team is part time and we will be asking some to go full time as we grow. We also promote from within including Nasir accepting our CTO role this year. Our team is also quite diverse, including about 1/3 women. More and more women are entering engineering roles so perhaps we will be able to hit 50% in the coming years. BTW, our first CTO was Nicole Anderson.