A.R.O. Reveals Saga, An “Ambient Companion” That Watches What You Do To Make Personal Recommendations
We’ve just been given a first look at Saga, a new mobile companion emerging from Seattle startup A.R.O. You can think of Saga as Siri’s little sister, perhaps. Instead of asking it questions or giving the app simple tasks (what’s the weather, add meeting calendar, e.g.), Saga is there, quietly tracking your behavior, your location and learning about your preferences, in order to make smarter recommendations about what you should do next. It’s the next evolution of those “ambient location” apps which were all the rage at this year’s SXSW, perhaps.
A.R.O is run by CEO Andy Hickl, formerly of Swingly, the NLP-based answer engine launched back in 2010. Saga is not the company’s only product – A.R.O. currently offers Bubbleator, too, which is a live wallpaper for Android. You may also remember hearing of A.R.O. back in 2010, when it first launched a suite of “semantic” core apps for Android phones backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Those Android apps have since become part of Xiant Software, a Paul Allen company and a brand that Chris Purcell runs. They do email and productivity apps for the Kindle fire right now, with more to come. Saga is A.R.O.’s new direction, run by an all-new team.
Saga: The App For Your Past, Present & Future
If anything, Saga is more of a competitor to Foursquare, the local discovery app that recently shifted focus away from the check-in to focus instead on its recommendations engine. Foursquare was able to do this because it had finally amassed a large enough place graph tied to our social connections and history of our visits to make sense of that data on a personalized level. Saga will attempt to do much of the same, but in a different way.
With all the data it collects like this, Saga can later provide you with a history of your activity for the day, week, month, etc. It can show you where you’ve been, how far you traveled, your top places and more. Basically, all that “quantified self” data that some people get a real kick out of.
Recommendations Are Key
Not all these features are live, however – they’re Saga’s potential. Of course, how well it works will be based on a number of factors, including the accuracy of its recommendation algorithms, its location accuracy, the overall users experience, and more. But the location accuracy seems promising, because it’s not based on GPS only. Instead, Saga uses a combination of factors (past history, similar users, accelerometer reads, set preferences, routines, etc.) to determine where you are. (The platform appears to use Alohar Mobile, more on that here, but the technology was built in-house, we’re told.)
The app is scheduled to launch in late June or early July on iOS, with Android to follow. More details are here.