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Build Club Spotlight: 💭 Curious Thing AI

Build Club Spotlight: 💭 Curious Thing AI

Replace your voicemail with AI

Daniel Malkinson
August 08, 2024

Welcome to the Build Club Spotlight Series, where we highlight some of the most promising AI startups!

In the 1970s, the voicemail was invented, since then we haven’t seen too many changes to the voicemail system besides occasionally a friend who changed his voicemail to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “I’ll be back!….please leave your message after the beep…[beep]…”

But let’s face it, who actually listens to voicemails anymore? We’ve moved on to texting or, better yet, letting someone else deal with the call.

Enter Curious Thing AI. They’ve taken it to the next level by creating an AI agent that answers your calls for you! It’s like having your very own virtual assistant who never takes a coffee break.

Today, we’re chatting with one of the minds behind this innovation, Sam Zheng , CEO, and co-founder of Curious Thing AI.

Let’s dive in!

What is your background and your story of founding Curious Thing AI?

Curious Thing AI was founded before the time of LLMs. We wanted to make voice AI smart, curious, and available for businesses of all sizes.

A month ago Sam wrote an article “Why do I want to Kill Voicemails?”. Sharing his story from moving to Australia 20 years ago, Sam highlighted the reasons for creating Lucy and releasing it everyone for Free.

Bringing his Data Science background into practice and some rough analysis, he calculated that in the US, with around ~10 billion voicemails a year, & more than 50% of voice mails ignored, humanity is wasting 20+ million hours of time annually.

With multiple lifetimes of voicemails being lost, there was an exciting opportunity to empower people to save time and introduce AI into their life.

How would you describe your product offerings to a new customer and to an AI engineer?

New customer: Everyone can use our flagship product, Lucy, to answer their missed calls and say goodbye to the boring voicemails.

AI Engineer: When you are busy coding, let Curious Thing’s Lucy answer your missed calls, respond to questions, and book meetings.

How has the journey been so far - how has Curious Thing AI evolved?

Three things we are extremely proud of:

During COVID, our AI helped multiple state governments with mission critical phone call tasks and saved thousands of hours for nurses and clinicians.
Today, we process approximately 200,000 phone calls per month for users in Australia, the US, the UK, and more.
We continue operating as a lean and small team

What advice would you give to aspiring AI builders?

Spend 100% of your time on the problem you are solving and 0% thinking about AI. Then, build it.

How can our audience help you build and grow Curious Thing AI?

Liked this post and want to be featured next? Reach out to Daniel Malkinson or [email protected]

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