Technology

Headspace, a meditation app with 31 million users that is valued at $320 million, is doubling down on voice and A.I. technology to help differentiate itself from the rest of the wellness pack. The company today has announced that it has acquiredAlpine.AI (previously called VoiceLabs), one of the early players in the digital assistant market, to bring more voice interaction into its main app.

&There are a few meditation apps out there right now…but the ability to react to where you are in your journey with specific advice through voice applications will be [far ahead] of where our competitors are,& says Headspace new CTO Paddy Hannon, who will lead the Alpine team of four who are joining Headspaceoffices in San Francisco.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the acquisition includes both the team and the technology, Headspace said.The team joining will include Alpine.AI co-founder and CTO Alexandre Linares and three engineers. Alpine.AI CEO Adam Marchick will retain an advisory role going forward.

VoiceLabs had experimented across a number of voice-based products over the years. They included a voice advertising product that Amazon squashed; an analytics service for voice app developers; and most recently, a solution that could build voice shopping apps by importing retailers& catalogs and using A.I. to answer customer questions about those products.

The latter, known as Alpine.AI, is what Headspace found most interesting.

Alpine.AI was working on solutions for retailers, which would allow customers to talk to their voice assistants naturally. For example, asking for a mascara, the voice assistant would respond with things like, &What color& and &Do you want it to be waterproof&

Headspace is not about to start selling make-up, but it does see potential in applying Alpine.AImachine learning technologies to its own domain.

Today, Headspaceprimary interface is audio. Users are guided through meditation sessions by the soothing, calm and distinctive voice of Andy Puddicombe, the co-founder who is a former Tibetan monk.

Building on that foundation, the plan will be to implement Alpine.AItechnology to give people an interactive voice-based way to discover the different meditation sessions available on Headspace, and to use those interactions to make better suggestionsto individual users.

A consumer might tell Headspace they&re &stressed out,& and the app would make an appropriate recommendation based on the customerhistory in the app.

The addition of Alpinetechnology could be a competitive advantage for Headspace, in the crowded and growing field of self-care apps.Headspace is just ahead of chief rival Calm.com in terms of valuation, with the latter at around $277 million, according to data from PitchBook.

Beyond the initial advantage of improving Headspacevoice apps, Hannon says Alpinetechnology can be put to use in other ways, as well, including within its iOS and Android apps where users& actions — not a voice command — could be the trigger that kicks off a personalized suggestion.

Hannon says Alpine.AI was also appealing because of how it was built.

&They built everything on Amazon. They use Docker. This was another reason it was a very attractive acquisition,& Hannon explains. &They built software using the same patterns that we build our software with internally. They&re leveraging much of the same database technologies that we&re using. They use REST services like we do…so from an infrastructure perspective, it was very straightforward.

&I think where itgoing to be interesting is attaching our audio content to their text-based system. But when you look at what Amazonproviding with things like Lex right now, therea lot of text-to-speech or speech-to-text systems, that I think will enable us to do that implementation,& he added.

The deal is also about betting on the future of voice computing. The number of voice-enabled digital assistant devices has grown to over 1 billion worldwide over the past two-and-a-half years. Today, 20 percent of U.S. households have a dedicated smart speaker, and that number is expected to grow.

As one of the leading apps in the profitableself-care app market, Headspace today reaches 31 million users, including over 1 million paying subscribers, across 190 countries. It also runs a B2B business focused on bringing its meditation exercises to larger organizations and their employees, where it has more than 250 businesses on board.

Alpine.AI was a seed-stage company at the time of the acquisition, having raised &a few million& from investors includingThe Chernin Group, Javelin Venture Partners and Betaworks. But while voice-enabled smart speakers have proven to have some popularity, we&ve yet to see many startups working in voice-based interfaces scale up and take on the likes of Nuance or other large platform players like Apple, Google and Amazon. This might have been part of the reason why Alpine.AI was an attractive acquisition target (and was also open to the exit).

The startup is winding down the small handful of retailers, including Petco, who were using the product and is offering each a one-on-one transition plan.

&We are thrilled to be dedicating our efforts to coaching and guiding users to build healthy routines,& said Alpine.AI CEOAdam Marchick, about the acquisition. &Alpinemachine learning capabilities accelerate Headspaceefforts to bring new conversational experiences to market.&

In an important move for inclusion in the gaming community, the Xbox Adaptive Controller, created for gamers with mobility issues, is now on sale. The Victoria and Albert Museum (V-A) also announced today that it has acquired the Xbox Adaptive Controller for display in its Rapid Response gallery dedicated to current events and pop culture.

First introduced in May, the Xbox Adaptive Controller can now be purchased online for $99.99. To create the controller, Microsoft collaborated with gamers with disabilities and limited mobility, as well as partners from several organizations, including the AbleGamers Charity, the Cerebral Palsy Foundation, Special Effect and Warfighter Engaged.

According to Microsoft, the Xbox Adaptive Controller project first took root in 2014 when one of its engineers spotted a custom gaming controller made by Warfighter Engaged, a non-profit that provides gaming devices for wounded and disabled veterans. During several of Microsofthackathons, teams of employees began working on gaming devices for people with limited mobility, which in turn gave momentum to the development of the Xbox Adaptive Controller.

In its announcement, the V-A said it added the Xbox Adaptive Controller to its collection because &as the first adaptive controller designed and manufactured at large-scale by a leading technology company, it represents a landmark moment in videogame play, and demonstrates how design can be harnessed to encourage inclusively and access.&

The Xbox Adaptive Controller features two large buttons that can be programmed to fit its userneeds, as well as 19 jacks and two USB ports that are spread out in a single line on the back of the device to make them easier to access. Symbols embossed along the back of the controllertop help identify ports so gamers don&t have to turn it around or lift it up to find the one they need, while grooves serve as guidelines to help them plug in devices. Based on gamer feedback, Microsoft moved controls including the D Pad to the side of the device and put the A and B buttons closer together, so users can easily move between them with one hand.

The controller slopes down toward the front, enabling gamers to slide their hands onto it without having to lift them (and also makes it easier to control with feet) and has rounded edges to reduce the change of injury if itdropped on a foot. The Xbox Adaptive Controller was designed to rest comfortably in laps and also has three threaded inserts so it can be mounted with hardware to wheelchairs, lap boards or desks.

In terms of visual design, the Xbox Adaptive Controller is sleek and unobtrusive, since Microsoft heard from many gamers with limited mobility that they dislike using adaptive devices because they often look like toys. The companyattention to detail also extends into the controllerpackaging, which is very easy to unbox because gamers told Microsoft that they are often forced to open boxes and other product packages with their teeth.

The most interesting thing about Burning Man, says me, is that ita testbed for a post-scarcity society. The irony of course is that such a testbed requires enormous amounts of money and resources, in a highly hostile and inaccessible environment. Thathow far you have to go to get away from the monetary / scarcity hierarchies of our world.

Ita lot of other things, of course: the worldbiggest, craziest, and most spectacular party, a huge EDM festival, a massive outdoor art gallery (both ephemeral and permanent — museum curators go out there to inspect the work with an eye towards adding to their collections), an experimental community, a secular pagan ritual, a set - setting for psychedelics, a holiday / reunion with onefriends, etcetera etcetera. Amusingly it is widely misunderstood as a hippie event, when its flamethrowers:guitars ratio is roughly 100:1 and its mottos include &Safety Third& and &Keep Burning Man Potentially Lethal.& It is also even, sometimes, very weirdly, misinterpreted as some kind of holiday-hackathon extension of Silicon Valley.

That last misunderstanding is instructive. The list of events this year included a so-called ‘VC/entrepreneur networking event and pitch session.& I did not attend, but a close friend did, and reported &it was the ultimate PoeLaw event … many people were genuinely crestfallen when they realized it was a joke.& It seems that the concept of a place that isn&t so much opposed to external social hierarchies as it is, much more interestingly, orthogonal to them — thata hard one for some people to to wrap their heads around.

Ittrue that Burning Man is very influential in the Valley, as this excellent Stanford News piece discusses. Ittrue that there is a lot of amazing technology out there — this year featured a glorious swarm/murmuration of 600(!) drones, paired twenty-foot Tesla coils, a whole panoply of robots, etc. But its makers go to show off what they have built to their community, not in the hopes of filthy lucre.

Don&t get me wrong. This experimental desert community very much has its own hierarchies, its own social capital, its own parasites, its own textbook full of unwritten rules, its own perfectly acceptable (indeed, proudly championed) logos. But the idea, at least, is: everyone works; everyone builds (if only a tent); everyone fights, and loses to, the dust; everyone amasses social capital by giving things and experiences rather than earning them; and everyone — whether riding atop a massive fire-breathing art car, or huddled in a mini-tent in the camp allotted to those bus riders who have nowhere else to go — is equally a participant, whether just helping and collaborating with those strangers in your immediate vicinity, or building some massive art/tech project for all to enjoy.

This orthogonality to external hierarchies, this competition to give rather than to take, is what makes it a fascinating de facto testbed for a post-scarcity society, among other forms of experimental community. And maybe thatwhy those who come but don&t participate in any community at all are so deeply scorned, loathed, and despised.

I refer of course to the infamous &turnkey camps& of (often very) wealthy people who pay money to have their hexayurts erected, their food provided, their experience guided and curated — to be spectators at the spectacle, basically. To exist differently from everyone else at the event. To bring their hierarchical upper-tier existence from the outside world to the playa; to infect our testbed with boring old capitalism.

Ittrue that rich people, especially from the Valley, have been coming to Burning Man and enjoying expensive luxuries there for a very long time. In 2001, Larry and Sergey chose Eric Schmidt as GoogleCEO in part because he was the only candidate who had been to Burning Man. Mark Zuckerberg once choppered in and spent an afternoon giving away grilled cheese sandwiches. Elon Musk dismissed the TV show &Silicon Valley& because it didn&t reflect the side of the Valley he saw at Burning Man. But they still made that happen themselves. Itonly been over the last few years that the experience has — allegedly — been for sale as a package deal.

This makes people very angry. Mostly, I think, because they are afraid. Capitalism is basically the Borg; it infects and subsumes everything it touches. Burning Man will become just another big party festival, is the fear, no longer an experimental community, much less a post-scarcity testbed.

And yet. I happened to spend Saturday night surrounded by a bunch of very clean, very wealthy people from a turnkey camp. There were old men in civilian shorts; young men in completely spotless, glittering, top-end multi-thousand-dollar burnerwear; a woman in a don&t-look-at-me-I&m-totally-not-a-celebrity custom full-face golden mask. They acted as a classic tour group, except instead of following a flag, their lead sherpa held a ten-foot length of quarter-inch rebar topped with a blinking LED heart.

And what I felt most, after I got over my initial resentment, was how sorry I was for them. I had solo camped in dusty squalor in the aforementioned bus camp … and I had clearly had a far more interesting and enjoyable time. Granted, I&m (relatively speaking) a crusty veteran of the event, but I suspect I would have had I been a virgin, too. And I think, as they looked around at the seventy thousand souls around them, many of whom were also very wealthy and could have purchased the turnkey experience, but instead chose to pour in an enormous amount of effort and experimentation, to construct colossal and/or intricate machines and/or monumental works of art, because they expected the rewards to be great — I think those much-loathed tourists knew this too.

So never mind their invasion. I expect Burning Man to remain remarkably resistant to capitalismBorg, and therefore an interesting experimental proving ground — for cultures, communities, and technologies — for the foreseeable future. (As well as a completely ridiculous party populated by completely ridiculous people, which is also very much one of its faces.) I don&t expect the turnkey tourists to convert. They&re too committed to their own hierarchies. But I do think we live in a very interesting time of technology-enabled cultural and community experimentation, and, as silly and over-the-top as Burning Man can seem and be, those experiments there are genuinely valuable.