Spanish Startup: Fiona Is Your Artificial, Virtual Cloud Based Assistant

Fiona,Spanish startup,startup,startups,startup interview,social roboticsThere’s a cool new social robotics startup in Spain, called Adele Robots,  that has created a collaborative, artificial, virtual, cloud based assistant. Her name is Fiona.

We’re not talking about Sims or avatars here, Fiona has features and skill sets that have been acquired by community collaboration, that the company calls “sparks”. One user may add a cool character trait while another may add a skill to make Fiona smarter. All of these sparks can be dragged and dropped when users create their own Fiona’s that are customizable to them.

As the company evolves, users will be able to use these cloud based, social robots for customer service, as a personal assistant or even for research. Think Siri with crowd sourced attributes that ends up actually looking like an avatar and having a personality of sorts.

Confused? Watch the video:

Now that you have a clearer understanding of what exactly Fiona is, we got a chance to talk to the founders of Adele Robots about Fiona. Check out the interview below.

What is Fiona?

Fiona is the first cloud platform that allows users to create their own intelligent personal assistant.

You can drag and connect different apps, called Sparks, created by developers, researchers, designers and companies from all over the world to build your intelligent personal assistant. Then you can embed it in your website so it can talk with your visitors, or use it on your phone, or your computer.

In layman’s terms, how does it work? (In other words how would you explain it to your grandmother)

If I have to explain this to my grandmother, I would try to draw some stick figures, but let’s say that Fiona lets you create characters you can interact with on your computer and websites.

Let’s try to explain Fiona using three words: Create, share and enjoy.

· Create: Connect the sparks you want your intelligent personal assistant to have and build it. It’s a drag and drop thing!

· Share: Get new Sparks at the store or share the ones you developed.

· Enjoy: Embed your intelligent personal assistant in your site, or use it in your phone or computer.

 

Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?

I’m Celestino Álvarez. I like to talk about myself in the third person, so here we go! Celestino always dreamt about having a robot that could help him and the people around him in every way. He studied very hard and now he has an Industrial Engineering degree and a Diploma in advanced studies in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence. Since 2005, he participates in the IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (ROMAN) held annually.

For more than 10 years Celestino Álvarez has been a technology consultant at Accenture and has contributed to technology implementation in over 40 companies. At Accenture he met Joaquín Martín, a telecommunication engineer and technology consultant for more than seven years at Accenture. There he has undertaken several projects, highlighting areas on Digital Management and Change Management.

Together they set up Adele Robots, a startup dedicated to help people using social robots.

Where are you based?

Our headquarters are based in Spain, but we are also proud to say that we are expanding our business to the United States, and that includes an office in the state of Delaware.

How did you come up with the idea of Fiona?

We are a lot into social robotics, but as people may notice, the state of the art right now is not what people expect from robots. So we thought: how do we make robots smarter so they can understand us and help us? And then we though, if we make robots smarter enough to understand us, we can transfer that knowledge to every gadget and computer.

The truth is that to understand human emotions and intelligence is a much more difficult task than everybody thinks, and it requires many different disciplines to complete the puzzle and create a true artificial mind, because that is what all it’s about. Each discipline, company and research group is devoted to create a small piece of that puzzle. But if those pieces do not come together, research groups will hardly match their developments and advances in order to unify them and work together to build the puzzle.

So we though, this is a great challenge. No matter how many resources you have at hand, it cannot be done by a single organization, so let’s work together to get it done faster. And that’s how we came up with the idea of Fiona.

How did you come up with the name?

Maybe it’s a little creepy, but we love to give people names to products. Fiona, stands for Framework for Interactive services Over Natural conversational Agents. Now you can forget that, and just simply remember that our product name is the same as Shrek’s girlfriend.

What problem does Fiona solve?

Have you ever wished your computer or smartphone could understand you and do exactly what you need?

Well, this happens to us every day and I’m sure it happened to you at some point.

Fiona allows you to make intelligent personal assistants, but when we say intelligent we mean it. We want your personal assistant to really help you in your tasks and not only to be funny.

Are you bootstrapped or funded?

We are definitely bootstrapped.

What’s one challenge you’ve overcome in the startup process?

It is difficult to choose only one, but I guess there are some great technical challenges, especially if we talk about Fiona’s development.

However in the overall we can say that social robotics market is not mature enough yet. Everybody knows about industrial robotics, but having a robot next to you in your daily life still sounds like science fiction. So we are trying to turn science fiction into a reality

What’s next for Fiona?

Soon we will launch a crowd funding campaign at Kickstarter. The final release is expected to be in 2013, however right now, we are in closed beta and we are looking for:

· Developers who want to create Sparks and share them in Fiona (for free or charging for it)

· Users who want to test the platform and its features.

Linkage:

Check out Fiona online here

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