LuzIA is an artificial intelligence assistant created by Spanish engineers that works as a contact on WhatsApp and Telegram – in Spanish, Catalan, Galician and Basque – and that in six months has exceeded 15 million users in Spain, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia . It uses language models from OpenAI, Llama and Kandinsky. This Spanish startup has just raised more than 9.5 million euros from investors including, for example, former basketball player Pau Gasol. Its CEO is Álvaro Higes.
What is LuzIA?
A personal assistant. It's like a person you have in the office who helps you with your agenda, with your day-to-day life, but who is also there to chat with you. And we transfer that to the private world. We want everyone to benefit.
What does it translate into?
Many use LuzIA to plan their menus, organize their week, their workouts, help the kids with their schoolwork and, this is a bit of a surprise, to chat. Many people are bored on the bus, send a message to LuzIA and start a conversation.
After WhatsApp and Telegram, do you have plans to expand into applications?
Probably yes, but we saw that the natural environment for people's conversation was WhatsApp. No hurry.
LuzIA solves what WhatsApp does not do, such as transcribing voice messages, a great annoyance for many.
They bothered us too. We all send them and it bothers us all to receive them. We took advantage of the LuzIA opportunity to be able to integrate that functionality. That has given us a lot of growth and a lot of virality, because everyone hates audios. It is widely used in Spain.
Are the main markets in Spanish?
We are open to everyone. Our networks allowed us to grow in Spain. From here we made the leap to Latin America. We realized that we were failing in other languages. We did the translation into Portuguese and expanded like wildfire in Africa and then in Brazil, which is now our main market.
On Amazon they explain that many people declare that they love Alexa. What about LuzIA?
We have comments from people who say things like “LuzIA is my best friend,” or “the only person who doesn't get bored of listening to me.” There are many people who are creating a personal connection. We have worked a lot on LuzIA's personality so that she is not a flat model. She is a friend who doesn't judge you.
Does smooth operation require a lot of investment?
It is not cheap. We have worked a lot on reducing latency. We make a very good product, which provides good service.
With so many people placing their trust in LuzIA, don't you feel too much responsibility?
The first thing we did was hire a lawyer to comply with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). For me, the responsibility is very great. Sometimes we have dilemmas about tweaking LuzIA's personality. If we change it and a person has made friends, they may not like it later. The beauty of the challenge is to be personal to the user, but also to be useful.
How are they going to monetize an assistant like LuzIA?
This is a completely new category and we need to first understand what value we generate for the user. It seems that we will go to a transaction model, such as accompanying a restaurant recommendation with a direct reservation.
The future of LuzIA?
I don't know, but what I would like is for it to be an assistant that would allow this interview, for example, to be scheduled by my LuzIA with your LuzIA.
