Former Plaud exec raises $26M for AI app that listens to you in the background

One of the core promises of AI is that the more it knows about a person, the better it will be able to assist them with tasks and make appropriate suggestions, which, if you’ll believe the tech companies, requires apps and devices to listen, watch, or record users’ activity all the time and gather all possible context.

人工智能的核心承诺之一是，它对一个人了解得越多，就越能更好地协助他们完成任务并提出适当的建议。如果你相信科技公司的说法，这就要求应用程序和设备必须时刻监听、观察或记录用户的活动，并收集所有可能的背景信息。

There’s obviously privacy and data security concerns with anything that’s collecting data about you continuously. But startups are building such apps undeterred anyway, arming themselves with the belief that the market for personalized assistance is big enough to swallow such concerns. Former Plaud exec Peter Mo is building Ambi to do something similar.

任何持续收集你数据的行为显然都会引发隐私和数据安全方面的担忧。但初创公司依然毫不退缩地开发此类应用，他们坚信个性化辅助市场的规模足以抵消这些顾虑。前 Plaud 高管 Peter Mo 正在打造 Ambi，旨在实现类似的功能。

The app aims to provide real-time intelligence and insights to people by listening to them all the time. The company said on Monday that it has raised $26 million across multiple funding rounds led by Luminous Ventures, which has backed companies like Meituan and Unitree Robotics, and original design manufacturer (ODM) Huaqin.

该应用旨在通过全天候监听，为用户提供实时的智能和洞察。该公司周一表示，已在多轮融资中筹集了 2600 万美元，由曾投资美团和宇树科技等公司的 Luminous Ventures 以及原始设计制造商（ODM）华勤领投。

Ambi is also releasing apps for iPhones, Macs, and Apple Watch. These apps act like meeting notetakers, but users can choose to have them listening so they can capture context all day. Meeting notetaking companies have been working to automate tasks that follow once calls are done, based on the summaries and action items they gather during the conversation, and using multitudes of connectors to software systems.

Ambi 还发布了适用于 iPhone、Mac 和 Apple Watch 的应用程序。这些应用类似于会议记录工具，但用户可以选择让它们持续监听，从而全天捕捉背景信息。会议记录公司一直致力于根据对话中收集的摘要和行动项，利用多种软件系统连接器，实现通话结束后的后续任务自动化。

Ambi wants to take this a step further by having its agent start the work during the meeting itself. The company’s promise is that its AI agent can proactively give you suggestions or surface relevant knowledge while you are in a meeting, based on your calendar, meetings, knowledge base, and web data. Users can also start a task on one device and continue it on another.

Ambi 希望更进一步，让其智能体在会议进行期间就开始工作。该公司的承诺是，其 AI 智能体可以根据你的日历、会议、知识库和网络数据，在你开会时主动提供建议或呈现相关知识。用户还可以在一台设备上开始任务，并在另一台设备上继续。

“The way we interact with intelligence is limited. Often the intelligence is trapped on the screen, and if you use hardware like Plaud, you need to wait for recording to transfer to the phone, upload to the cloud, and get intelligence after processing. That’s why we are building Ambi to use AI anytime and anywhere,” Mo, the company’s co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch.

“我们与智能交互的方式是有限的。通常，智能被困在屏幕上；如果你使用像 Plaud 这样的硬件，你需要等待录音传输到手机、上传到云端，并在处理后才能获得智能结果。这就是我们构建 Ambi 的原因，旨在随时随地使用 AI，”该公司联合创始人兼首席执行官 Mo 对 TechCrunch 表示。

The company has ambitions to capture more information. Its upcoming desktop app will be able to look at the work that users do and store important parts in its memory to give more personalized suggestions. Apps like Littlebird or Minimi already do something similar. The startup is also planning to launch its own hardware device, which will have a screen, a speaker, a camera, and microphones to capture context and display information.

该公司雄心勃勃，希望捕捉更多信息。其即将推出的桌面应用程序将能够查看用户的工作内容，并将重要部分存储在内存中，以提供更个性化的建议。Littlebird 或 Minimi 等应用已经实现了类似功能。该初创公司还计划推出自己的硬件设备，该设备将配备屏幕、扬声器、摄像头和麦克风，用于捕捉背景信息并显示内容。

Ambi’s launch comes amidst growing concerns around AI devices that don’t have enough indicators to suggest they are capturing data on people around the user. It is not clear if Ambi’s apps or its upcoming device will have enough indicators to alert third parties that their conversations are being recorded if the user doesn’t disclose their use of Ambi’s tech.

Ambi 的发布正值人们对 AI 设备日益担忧之际，因为这些设备往往缺乏足够的指示器来表明它们正在捕捉用户周围人员的数据。目前尚不清楚，如果用户未披露其正在使用 Ambi 技术，Ambi 的应用程序或其即将推出的设备是否会有足够的指示器来提醒第三方他们的谈话正在被录音。

Some meeting notetakers have even been sued because their tech recorded people’s conversations and data without their consent. Plus, the recent release of Apple’s Audio Intelligence feature, which transcribes speech continuously, has raised privacy concerns. Mo said that users can turn off ambient data capture on Ambi’s apps and devices at any time, and the feature is off by default.

一些会议记录工具甚至因为在未经同意的情况下录制人们的谈话和数据而遭到起诉。此外，苹果公司最近发布的音频智能功能（可连续转录语音）也引发了隐私担忧。Mo 表示，用户可以随时在 Ambi 的应用程序和设备上关闭环境数据捕捉功能，且该功能默认处于关闭状态。

The startup said it doesn’t store any recordings of users and encrypts the data, but it didn’t specify what kind of encryption it uses. Despite these measures, the onus of declaring ambient capture is still on the users. He classified this as an industry-wide problem.

该初创公司表示，它不会存储任何用户录音并会对数据进行加密，但并未说明使用何种加密方式。尽管采取了这些措施，但声明环境捕捉的责任仍在用户身上。他将此归类为整个行业面临的问题。

“We have to inform our users that they have to tell others about ambient capture. We, as an industry, haven’t solved this problem [of disclosure]. We have tried to put the information about disclosure in every place possible, but if users try to hide the capture, we can’t just solve the problem,” he said.

“我们必须告知用户，他们必须向他人说明环境捕捉的情况。作为行业，我们还没有解决这个（披露）问题。我们已尝试在所有可能的地方放置有关披露的信息，但如果用户试图隐瞒捕捉行为，我们无法单方面解决这个问题，”他说。

Ambi currently has over 50 staff across offices in San Francisco, Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen. The company is hiring for its go-to-market function and AI engineers for working on speech-recognition models.

Ambi 目前在旧金山、北京、上海和深圳设有办事处，拥有 50 多名员工。该公司正在招聘市场推广人员以及致力于语音识别模型的 AI 工程师。