3 Years In Stealth, $20 Million Raised, Aro Mobile Shows Android Skin - Invites.

I only watched the short video, but nothing appears revolutionary here. I seem to recall that recognising phone numbers, address and so fourth was advertised as a feature of android 1.x release.

Alot of the cleverness of the so called AI can by equally well replicated just by using well implemented device wide search, and the name recognition can generally be achieved either by looking up an exchange server, or regex'ing for common first name pattern and non-dictionary surname.

To me this does seem to be 'just another' skin, and visually, it doesn't seem very impressive at all.

Was anyone else here with a modern smart phone impressed?

You would think they could have done more with $20 Million and 3 years. I am not knocking their work, but when it comes to the smart phone space, what they have shown feels a few years too late.

There are some interesting things they showed but as a whole it is lackluster and ugly in some circumstances. Probably the only feature I would want is the context option for names. Otherwise the interface doesn't seem intuitive (even worse than 1.6 Android) and is a step back from the advancements Google has made in the last year or so.

(@aromobile company) If we were just doing pattern recognition (ie. "Edward Wheeler" = "Edward Wheeler") then you'd be totally right about nothing being revolutionary here. However, Aro Mobile is built on top of an advanced natural language processing and semantic data analytics services that basically figure out that "Ed" OR "E.W." OR "Eddie" might all be equal to "Edward Wheeler". Our predictive analysis figures out how likely your usage might be, depending on your past activity with "Edward." Then our system analyzes what information we have associated with "Ed Wheeler" and links information together. It works because it's based on your patterns -- if you regularly call "Edward Wheeler" by the name "Ed," we help by figuring that out. There's a lot more to say, but that's one basic example.

You are also right that we also need to do a lot more to improve the product. We welcome feedback through our beta program, so we can continue to improve our product.

I have an Android and I'd buy this app after making sure it works as demoed. I love the sliding email & messages on the front page. A very nice change from having to navigate to an emails-only or SMS-only page. I also like the integrated time/place/person detection for adding events to calendars. Of course, the email they showed was too obvious, it remains to be shown how well the app can recognize back-and-forth emails about timing and location. I liked the easy switching between searching for some name on the web, in mentioned emails, and as senders; that will be very useful for me. Also, the fireworks-like expansion of nodes is very intuitive.

The robotic female voice wasn't a highlight of the video.