Three former Google X scientists purpose to present you a second mind just about — not within the sci-fi or chip-in-your-head sense, however by an AI-powered app that good points context by listening to every little thing you say within the background. Their startup, TwinMind, has raised $5.7 million in seed funding and launched an Android model, together with a brand new AI speech mannequin. It additionally has an iPhone model.
Co-founded in March 2024 by Daniel George (CEO) and his former Google X colleagues Sunny Tang and Mahi Karim (each CTOs), TwinMind runs within the background, capturing ambient speech (with person permission) to construct a private information graph.
By turning spoken ideas, conferences, lectures, and conversations into structured reminiscence, the app can generate AI-powered notes, to-dos, and solutions. It really works offline, processes audio in actual time to transcribe on-device, and might seize audio repeatedly for 16 to 17 hours with out draining the machine’s battery, the founders say. The app may also again up person information so conversations could be recovered if the machine is misplaced, although customers can choose out of that. It additionally helps real-time translation in over 100 languages.
TwinMind differentiates itself from AI assembly note-takers like Otter, Granola, and Fireflies by capturing audio passively within the background all day. To make this doable, the group constructed a low-level service in pure Swift that runs natively on the iPhone. In distinction, many rivals use React Native and depend on cloud-based processing, which Apple restricts from operating within the background for prolonged intervals, George stated in an unique interview.
“We spent about six to seven months final 12 months simply perfecting this audio seize repeatedly and getting there to search out a variety of hacks round Apple’s walled backyard,” he advised iinfoai.
George left Google X in 2020 and bought the thought for TwinMind in 2023 when he was working at JPMorgan as Vice President and Utilized AI Lead, attending back-to-back conferences every day. To avoid wasting time, he constructed a script that captured audio, transcribed it on his iPad, and fed it into ChatGPT — which started to know his tasks and even generate usable code. Impressed by the outcomes, he shared it with pals and posted about it on Blind, the place others confirmed curiosity however didn’t need one thing operating on their work laptops. That led him to construct an app that would run on a private cellphone, quietly listening throughout conferences to collect helpful context.
Along with the cellular app, TwinMind gives a Chrome extension that gathers extra context by browser exercise. Utilizing imaginative and prescient AI, it might probably visually scan open tabs and interpret content material from varied platforms, together with e-mail, Slack, and Notion.
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The startup even used the extension itself to shortlist interns from over 850 functions they obtained this summer time.
“We opened all of the LinkedIn profiles and CVs of the 854 candidates in browser tabs, then requested the Chrome extension to rank one of the best candidates,” George stated. “It did a incredible job — that’s how we employed our last 4 interns.”
He famous that present AI chatbots — together with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude — can’t simply course of a whole lot of paperwork or parse sign-ups from instruments like LinkedIn or Gmail to collect contextual data. Equally, AI-powered browsers comparable to these from Perplexity and The Browser Firm lack the flexibility to construct information out of your offline conversations and in-person conferences.
The startup presently has over 30,000 customers, with about 15,000 of them lively every month. As a lot as 20% to 30% of TwinMind customers additionally use the Chrome extension, George stated.
Whereas the U.S. is the biggest base for TwinMind up to now, the startup can be seeing traction from India, Brazil, the Philippines, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Europe.
TwinMind targets the final viewers, though 50% to 60% of its customers are presently professionals, about 25% are college students, and the remaining 20% to 25% are people utilizing it for private functions.
George advised iinfoai that his father is among the many people utilizing TwinMind to put in writing their autobiography.
One in every of AI’s important drawbacks is its potential to compromise person privateness. However George asserted that TwinMind doesn’t prepare its fashions on person information and is designed to work with out sending recordings to the cloud. Not like many different AI note-taking apps, TwinMind doesn’t let customers entry audio recordings later — the audio is deleted on the fly — whereas solely the transcribed textual content is saved regionally within the app, he famous.
Google X expertise helped velocity issues up
The TwinMind co-founders spent a couple of years engaged on varied tasks at Google X. George advised iinfoai that he labored on six tasks alone, together with iyO — the group behind AI-powered earbuds, which just lately made headlines for suing OpenAI and Jony Ive. That have helped the TwinMind group transfer rapidly from idea to product.
“Google X was really the right place to arrange for beginning your personal firm,” stated George. “There are round 30 to 40 startup-like tasks occurring at any given time. No one else will get to work at six early-stage startups over two or three years earlier than launching their very own — a minimum of not in such a brief span.”
Earlier than becoming a member of Google, George labored on making use of deep studying to gravitational wave astrophysics as a part of the Nobel Prize–profitable LIGO group on the College of Illinois’ Nationwide Middle for Supercomputing Purposes. He had accomplished his PhD in AI for astrophysics in only one 12 months — on the age of 24 — a feat that led him to hitch Stephen Wolfram’s analysis lab in 2017 as a deep studying and AI researcher.
That early reference to Wolfram got here full circle years later — he ended up writing the primary test for TwinMind, marking his first-ever funding in a startup. The latest seed spherical was led by Streamlined Ventures, with participation from Sequoia Capital and different traders, together with Wolfram. The spherical values TwinMind at $60 million post-money.
TwinMind Ear-3 mannequin
Along with its apps and browser extension, TwinMind has additionally launched the TwinMind Ear-3 mannequin, a successor to its present Ear-2, which helps over 140 languages worldwide and has a phrase error fee of 5.26%, the startup stated. The brand new mannequin may also acknowledge completely different audio system in a dialog and has a speaker diarization error fee of three.8%.
The brand new AI mannequin is a fine-tuned mix of a number of open supply fashions, skilled on a curated set of human-annotated web information — together with podcasts, movies, and flicks.
“We discovered that the extra languages you assist, the higher the mannequin will get at understanding accents and regional dialects as a result of it’s coaching on a broader vary of audio system,” George stated.
The mannequin prices $0.23/ hour and will likely be out there by an API to builders and enterprises over the following few weeks.
The Ear-3, in contrast to the Ear-2, doesn’t assist a whole offline expertise, as it’s bigger in measurement and runs on the cloud. Nonetheless, the app routinely switches to Ear-2 if the web goes away after which strikes again to Ear-3 when it’s again, George stated.
With the introduction of the Ear-3, TwinMind now gives a Professional subscription at $15/month, with a bigger context window of as much as 2 million tokens and e-mail assist inside 24 hours. Nonetheless, there may be nonetheless a free model with all the prevailing options, together with limitless hours of transcriptions and on-device speech recognition.
The startup presently has a group of 11 members. It plans to rent a couple of designers to boost its person expertise and arrange a enterprise improvement group to promote its API. Moreover, there are plans to spend some cash on buying new customers.
