early.tools 008 » Dot by new.computer just launched!

Yo earlies. ☼

Welcome to the 8th edition of the weekly early.tools newsletter. Every Monday, you will get 5x of the latest notable pre-launch startups delivered to your inbox. I am Julian Paul and I will do my best to update you as tools move through Waitlist → MVP → Launched phases, so you don’t miss a thing in the early startup lifecycle of products that will (most likely) matter.

Edition 008 is proudly brought to you by LaunchList – if you have an idea you want to launch, a viral Waitlist is just what you’ll need…

But without further ado, let’s get into a launched update. 👀

Launched update

On June 20th, Dot was launched by new.computer, garnering lots of interest from FastCompany and many more media outlets. What does it do though? Dot is, at its most simple, an app you chat with on iOS. You can send it words, voice memos, pictures, and PDFs, and it’s thrilled to search the web for you, too. Communicating through written text. It’s kind of like your personal AI companion that learns about you through journal entries and curious auto-prompting. What’s more – they will launch the Dot voice sometime this year (the movie Her, anyone?!). Imho, a highly personalised AI like this has tons of applications like suggesting places and experiences based on its understanding of your preferences. Kevin Fischer has put this to the test with a coffee shop recommendation in his area – surely a novel experience.

I have tried it over the weekend and quite like the tone of voice Dot writes in, however, I am not sure how sticky the product is, as it’s still quite basic in functionality. I think you should try it out because there are very few ventures out there that answer a basic question: What would it be like for an AI to actually know you? We simply have no idea what that looks or feels like…