Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer unveils Dazzle AI assistant — TechCrunch

Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has unveiled the personal AI assistant Dazzle, which builds an understanding of a user exclusively from photos in their smartphone gallery. As TechCrunch reports, the project raised $8 million in seed funding in December last year.

Context from the photo gallery

Unlike other AI assistants that obtain data from email, calendars, or purchase history, Dazzle analyzes only images saved on the phone. According to Mayer, the service can identify hobbies, interests, food and style preferences, how users spend their time, and whom they spend it with.

The assistant is available through an app and text messages. It has two main use cases: completing current tasks based on recent photos and creating personalized recommendations based on the entire photo library. In particular, Dazzle can extract information from an event poster for a calendar or suggest a repair specialist after detecting damaged garage doors in a photo.

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Recommendations and privacy

Dazzle also offers ideas for family leisure, travel, or birthday gifts. Mayer said that after analyzing photos of her family, the service identified an interest in escape rooms and suggested several locations in the San Francisco Bay Area.

During testing by a TechCrunch journalist, the assistant recommended Mediterranean destinations for a vacation, likely taking into account previous trips to Spain and Greece. At the same time, the service did not take into account that the journalist's daughter already knows how to roller skate.

Mayer claims that giving access to a photo gallery may seem safer to users than granting access to email correspondence and messages. According to her, Dazzle prioritizes privacy and discards personal data that the AI labels as sensitive. Earlier, Mayer's startup Sunshine launched the photo-sharing app Shine, but later shut it down.