reQall Rover: The app that organises your day

Welcome to the world of anticipatory assistance where you don't need to search for the information you require, it is served to you on a platter. Or rather, it will appear on your smartphone without you having even asked for it. And very soon, it will be available on any smart device, be it a tablets, a pair of glasses or a watch.

Your proactive personal assistance will not only provide you information about your local traffic, weather, nearby restaurants etc. but also anything else you can think of. You can also hear the information instead of having to read it. You can get an audible summary which can be listened to even while you are brushing your teeth, bathing or driving.

One of the players in the field of predictive personal assistance computing is reQall Inc. It started off with an app named reQall - a location-based to-do list or memory aid of sorts that was created at the MIT Media Lab.

Today the company boasts a robust platform that corporate houses can build their customised predictive searches on. To showcase the potency of the platform, the company has an internal app called reQall Rover-  a personalised, location-based app providing information on various things. reQall Rover uses location, time of day, and other contextual information to provide quick capsules of information.
 
If you connect it to your email and social networks, it can process even more information - such as the kind of news you like to read or information about your specific commute. It can even pick out important points from your email and Facebook feeds, summarising the content for you when you don't have time to read it. If you have a meeting coming up with a bigwig from another company, it'll see this on your calendar and provide you information about that person from sources like LinkedIn. reQall Rover is an intelligent, proactive assistant that continuously data mines past, current, and future context and offers assistance unprompted. It doesn't sit idle waiting for the user to ask a question before offering assistance.
 
"What our platform does is offer a palate of assistance that companies across varied domains can license to build on. Some of the top areas of need for personal assistance that we are seeing are email assistance, including email summarizing, commute assistance, biography assistance, meeting help and taxi booking," says Sunil Vemuri, Co founder and Chief product Officer at reQuall Inc. "Our business model is licensing the technology which companies can then customise. We concentrate on building and fine tuning our platform on which companies can build their own apps of personal assistance."

Comparing their offering to Google Now, Vemuri says, "Google Now is a closed environment that companies can't augment, change or build on or customise whereas the reQall platform is customisable. Companies in a variety of industries can build on it to customise personal assistance for their customers."

"Also, if a company uses Google Now, Google owns the data. A lot of companies do not want to share their data. Companies using the reQall platform do not need to share their data. The reQall platform offers email assistance and we also have the technology for gauging what activity the user is engaged in, how much attention he or she can give and can filter information that comes to a user based on the activity. For example, if a user is in an important meeting, he/she might get a message from a spouse but not a message that can await a response," adds Vemuri.

Proactive personal assistance has expanded people's imagination on what technology can do. This is just a start. Commenting on some of the requestsfor personal assistance they get from their partners, Vemuri adds, "Personal assistance in travel scenarios where a smartphone can act like a travel guide, or requests for engaging users to not just react to a doctor's advice but to proactively engage in improving the quality of their health like reminders set for exercising or eating right etc. are some of the many areas that we are getting requests for from various verticals."