Google Vet collects USD 8 million on Continua to take AI agents for group chats

(*8*)At the starting of 2023, David Petrou, an outstanding engineer and member of the founding father of each Google goggles And Google Glass, made a surprising move. After greater than 17 years, he left the company to start his own startup.

“I saw how quickly technology is changing, and I felt that there are some ideas that are best studied in the context of the startup,” said Petrou Techcrunch.

His final idea was to build ContinuesAn organization dealing with consumers that uses AI agents to increase cooperation and interaction in group chats for SMS, IMessage and Discord.

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“The simple way to think about it is that we bring LLM power to group chats,” said Petrou.

Continua announced on Tuesday that she collected a round for seeds value $ 8 million. Financing was conducted by GV, with an additional participation of Bessemer Ventures Partners and a group of angels.

When developing, Continua Petrou noticed that individuals would interact with chatgpt or other LLM, and then copy and pasted what they learned in a group conversation.

“If you and I plan to travel or try to find out what to eat for dinner or what movie to watch, all these things can be facilitated by LLM participating in group chat,” said Petrou.

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Continua claims that his AI agents can reduce group chaos by joining conversations and offering helpful information only when needed.

When the group discusses the projects and common plans, Continua can routinely set reminders, run the polls, add calendar invitations or generate Google documents using control lists and a letter to be done.

If you forget the details from group chat, comparable to meeting time or location, he can simply direct the message to the message to privately ask for information.

At first glance, Continua could appear to be a easy application of artificial intelligence, but Petrou claims that getting LLM in an interview with many people is a fairly complex technical problem. Because most AI models are designed for conversations between one person and one assistant, Continua had to tune her technology to understand the dynamics of group chat discussions.

For example, group members do not need a proceed to respond to every little thing they write.

“You want the agent to have social intelligence,” said Petrou. He added that they’d to “break the LLM brain” to naturally integrate artificial intelligence with conversations.

Users may cause Continua when they need her help, or tell the agent to “hang” if it is too often.

Users can start with Continua, adding their phone number to the group SMS or username to the discord chat.

While several corporations, including Meta and Startup Hey Umai, offer AI agents for talks, Petrou insists that Continua is most fitted for group interactions.

Erik Nordlander, GV general partner, said that his company invested in Petrou even before the concept of the Continua Chat Ai group was completely formed. “David is a really brilliant engineer, someone who worked with artificial intelligence before it was a hot thing.”

According to Nordlander, Continua has several potential profitability paths. The agent is already helping in planning events and travel booking, for which he suggested that they might charge in the future.

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