MongoDB Powers x.ai's Artificial Intelligence-Driven Personal Assistant That Takes the Hassle Out of Scheduling

NEW YORK, NY and PALO ALTO, CA--(Marketwired - Mar 24, 2015) - MongoDB today announced that NYC-based startup x.ai powers its artificial intelligence (AI)-based virtual personal assistant with MongoDB.

Intelligent personal assistants are increasingly popular, with applications that have become household names such as Apple's Siri and Google's Google Now. According to x.ai, the market for democratizing access to a Personal Assistant that can schedule meetings for free or for a monthly service charge is massive. In the U.S. alone, there are 87 million knowledge workers who spend nearly five hours per week scheduling meetings.

To address growing demand, x.ai launched two personal assistants, twins "Amy" and "Andrew." Designed to interact and perceive needs like a personal assistant, these virtual assistants eliminate the tedious email ping-pong that accompanies arranging a meeting. Users simply copy their virtual assistant on email with up to four individuals they wish to schedule a meeting, then the assistant takes over and coordinates the schedules using natural language processing, providing an experience that is entirely seamless. The assistant identifies the best time and place for everyone and confirms the information into all parties' calendars by sending out an invite.

MongoDB is the system of record for the entire x.ai platform.

"The schema flexibility and DevOps simplicity of MongoDB make it the best database for launching and scaling startups," said Alex Poon, COO and Founder at x.ai. "MongoDB was fundamental to our success early on, when we were changing the data model weekly, and remains so today, with our focus on continuous integration through weekly sprints. Without MongoDB, we would not be able to model such complex data for such a sophisticated solution so easily."

How It Works
x.ai passes each email through natural language processing and supervised learning engines that understand the context of the information before it is enriched and stored in MongoDB. Based on these inputs -- plus relevant context such as user scheduling preferences -- the assistant determines the appropriate course of action and crafts a response using a set of dynamic email responses stored in MongoDB to set up a meeting based on a mutually agreeable time and place.

"We're starting to see artificial intelligence play an important role in modern applications, especially daily applications that have a huge impact on our lives," said Dev Ittycheria, president and CEO, MongoDB. "x.ai is an excellent example of the many innovative startups building and growing their business on MongoDB. As 12 to 18 month development cycles become a thing of the past, startups need the flexibility that MongoDB offers to painlessly evolve both the data and business models and easily scale to meet vast demand."

x.ai uses MongoDB Management Service (MMS) to manage backups of their production data. The company is evaluating MongoDB's text and geospatial analytics capabilities for future releases.

The world's fastest growing database, MongoDB has a thriving global community with more than 9 million downloads of its open-source database, 2,000 customers, 750 partners, 250,000 MongoDB University students, 35,000 MongoDB user group (MUG) members and 30,000 MongoDB Days attendees.

Resources:

• Learn more about x.ai. 
• The x.ai team will be at MongoDB World this June, presenting on how they built their backend. If you're interested in learning more, register now and come see x.ai and 100+ other sessions.
• Follow x.ai on Twitter and LinkedIn.
• Join MongoDB on LinkedIn and follow @MongoDB and @MongoDBInc on Twitter.

About x.ai
Founded in 2014, x.ai builds and maintains an artificial intelligence powered personal assistant that schedules meetings for our business customers. Located in New York and backed by its founders and blue chip investors like Softbank Capital, IA Ventures, Lerer Ventures, FirstMark Capital, Pritzker Group Venture Capital, and CrunchFund.

About MongoDB
MongoDB is the next-generation database that helps businesses transform their industries by harnessing the power of data. The world's most sophisticated organizations, from cutting-edge startups to the largest companies, use MongoDB to create applications never before possible at a fraction of the cost of legacy databases. MongoDB is the fastest-growing database ecosystem, with over 9 million downloads, thousands of customers, and over 750 technology and service partners. Learn more at www.mongodb.com.