Transforming AI Interactions with eSelf’s Dr. Alan Bekker

Hey, everyone. Welcome back here to Tech Drunk tv. Really excited to have my next guest on here.

Well, it's a couple of reasons, but always, it's always a pleasure to have another Alan on, on the show with me, especially when it spells it the right way. Let me introduce you to Dr. Allen Becker.

Uh, Allen is the co-founder and CEO of a company called E Self, and we're gonna find out about E Self and what they do in a second. But let's first welcome Dr. Becker.

How are you? I'm it. I can call you Alan, right?

Well, yeah. Uh, Alan, it's, it's great. Thank you, Alan, for having me.

It's a pleasure to be here today. Uh, I was looking forward to, to be here for a long time. Absolutely.

Uh, it's a pleasure to have you on. So, before we talk about e self and, and AI avatars and so forth, let's talk a little bit about you. You, you know, it's, it's Dr.

Allen Becker. I'm gonna assume you have a little education behind you there, and there's a story involved. Let's hear, let's hear the Dr.

Allen Becker story. Yes. Uh, so I, I, I started my, my career as a engineer, computer scientist.

But, uh, when I graduated, um, I completely, by mistake, I would say I went to a course named Introduction to Machine Learning. It was in 2012, and, uh, I was married since then. So I told my wife, Lisa, uh, I think I know what I wanna do when I grow up.

I was already 23. Um, so instead of, you know, going to the industry and start working as a, as an engineer, I spent many years in the university, in the academy, uh, pursuing my PhD in, um, machine learning and deep learning. And I published many papers, 10 papers in the field of, uh, speech technologies, uh, computer vision, natural language processing, kind of, uh, multimodal machine learning, uh, products.

And my passion was, you know, always about, uh, creating the machines, uh, AI software that can interact with the human as in the most, uh, human-like manner. Uh, and when I started my journey as I'm a PhD, you know, the, the world was so different as of today. I mean, we, we couldn't believe that the, the technology that exists today, uh, would actually exist a few years ago when I was a, a, you know, a junior researcher back then.

But anyhow, when I finished, uh, my PhD, I decided to, to be an entrepreneur. ai. Voca was all about having voice to voice conversations between humans and machines.

Uh, it was in 2018, we were probably one of the first, uh, companies, uh, out there doing, uh, voice conversations, uh, between humans, uh, and ai. And we built, uh, I would say, uh, great technology in-house, uh, for speech to tech technologies, tech to speech technologies, everything running in real time. LLMs, the language models didn't exist back then, so that it did, has some limitations.

But anyhow, we managed to reach a huge scale in, uh, two to three years from the inception of the company, and eventually got acquired by Snapchat at the end of 2020. Uh, uh, after three years of think after, after the inception of the company, uh, I joined Snapchat as the head of, uh, conversational ai, leading the conversational AI efforts, the voice efforts, the, the language model efforts within snap. And it was, it was an amazing journey because, uh, we managed to, you know, to reach a huge scale of, uh, hundreds of million of daily active users that were using our, uh, voice technologies.

So it was, you know, it was beautiful to see that the baby that we built at voca it scale up, uh, that fast at Snap. And obviously it was a very nice out financial outcome for, uh, for, uh, the share shareholders of the company as well. Uh, uh, that's pretty much about, uh, um, my previous company, after Snap, after a few years, uh, that I spent on Snap, I decided to actually, to build, uh, the next generation of my previous company of voca.

And, uh, to create video experiences, real time video experiences between humans and ai, a video experience. It's, it is something that, like, like we have right now, Alan, we are having a Zoom conversation. Uh, you can see me, I can see you.

We are interacting real time. I can share my screen with you. You can share your screen with me.

It's a fully interactive video experience, and that's exactly what we do. At at TO. We created, uh, uh, avatars platforms that allows to every creator to be video experiences.

The video experiences, it, it, uh, it has a, an avatar obviously, that you can choose, a voice that you can craft. And, uh, I would say, uh, uh, prompt based, textual way to control the behavior of this avatar, to control the capabilities of those avatars. Those avatars can, as I said, can analyze you how how you do, like, can analyze your screen.

For example, if you have an, uh, it support issue, if you're, if you're struggling to log in to some page, you can show your screen with the avatar, and the avatar will guide you how to solve a problem step by step. If you are trying to solve a math problem on your, uh, LMS and your learning management, uh, uh, um, school, you have some equations. You can share your screen with the avatar and it can guide you step by step how to, uh, as the same way as a private teacher would do, the avatar can do for you.

And the other way around, if you want to consume information, if you are intrigued, intrigued to learn a new subject, you can ask the avatar. And the avatar can not only respond to you in real time with a human-like face and everything, he can actually present you videos in real time. He can generate images and content in real time to you to explain you the different concepts that, uh, uh, you're interested in.

So, for example, in education, we have tons of use cases in which are the students that are using esol. Uh, the AI avatars can, um, they have a board. They can write the equations for you.

They can guide you step by step how, how to solve math problems. They can, if you ask history questions, then they won't only answer to you, but they will illustrate those, uh, the history with images. They will generate in real time images for you in order to illustrate the history, because we believe it is of that, the, the, I would say the, the, the most updated way to communicate between humans is through a video experiences.

A video experience is an emerging experience that is, uh, quite different from chatting or voice because it, because it has the visual, uh, uh, aspect of on top of it. And visual helps for learning, helps for engagement. So all the use cases that we do at ISSO are around visual interactions.

Love it. What a great story. You know, Alan, I'm sitting here listening and really, and I mean, if you could go back to your 23-year-old self and say, Hey, keep doing what you're doing.

'cause this is what the world's gonna look like in 2025. You probably, and, and it wasn't that long ago, right? It was, what, 12 years ago Towards the thirties?

No, correct. 12 years. I mean, I look over my career, right?

When I was 23, I actually had just taken the bar exam and become an attorney in New York. And, um, I didn't know anything about computers. I got into computers, never took a computer class.

I got into computers after I went to law school. After I started practicing law, I learned how to use word perfect and how to do networking. 'cause no one knew how to do it in my office.

And I, I became the expert. But what you did, a lot of the things you were studying are really sort of the precursors, the foundational like proteins, if you will, that we built the DNA of, of AI and, and generative and machine learning on, right? We, without the, the text to voice and the voice to text and, and all of these things, you, you, you didn't have that interaction that we, now we, you know, a lot of people think about your kids or my kids, you know, or my kids are done with college already, but, you know, kids coming out today, they take it for granted, right?

There'll be a time when you, maybe you don't use a keyboard in the mouse, right? Which is, you know, the whole, the whole system of the mouse and the windows is, you know, comes out of Xerox spark. Yeah.

And the seventies, or even the sixties. Um, so it, it's interesting to, you know, to, to be how that all comes together. Now, I don't know if you're old enough to remember a TV show called Max Headroom.

Probably not. It was here in the us It was, it was so far ahead of its time. So Max Headroom was a newscaster, but he, he wasn't real.

He was an avatar. He was a, an AI avatar. And, you know, this is before there's ai, there is, you know, there's real, it was really ahead of its time.

But it, it, I remember the discussions back then, and one of the big discussions, and it repeats itself, it repeats itself in robotics today, is how realistic do we want our avatars to be? Do we want them to be indistinguishable? Like, if I'm doing a video like this, is it a real person, not a real person, but is it photorealistic of a person?

Or is it obvious that the person's not real? Right? Like, I'm not fooling anyone.

I'm not trying to make you think I'm a real person. I am an a i avatar, but I can engage with you, answer your questions, help you do everything. Um, just curious, where where are you on that side of the, of the debate?

Um, so I think it's a great question. And we, we are being asked a lot about this topic, so obviously have tons of things to say about it. So first of all, you know, from my passion point of view, my dream is to create the perfect ai just as a, as a nerd, I would say that, right?

Uh, regardless what is the correct way or not, but we, we discuss it in, uh, for, uh, uh, shortly, don't worry. But from my personal point of view, the dream to create the perfect machine that is as human as possible, being able to pass a during test is a dream is that dream that, uh, is coming true. Right?

So why is a dream? Yeah. I mean, it goes way behind of, uh, being a geek or not.

It goes maybe to some philosophical questions about, uh, what is to be human? What is, what does it mean to be human? What is a human?

But some to you give some sense. If you can create a machine that is, uh, like human, you kind of, uh, maybe understand maybe a bit more what is a human, because you created it, uh, you know, it goes way behind the u the the best ux, but more like, uh, from a personal perspective that the fact that we created something that, uh, is in indistinguishable from humans, it's like an, uh, something that we achieved as a humanity. Okay?

That's one thing. But, but referring to, to, to your main question, I believe as humans, we, we love to interact with sim similar person, right? That, that that's our nature, right?

Uh, the, the reason why there are people that they're racist is because there's someone that looks different, sound different, and behaves differently. And we are kind of, uh, intuitively we, we, we are afraid from people that look and sound different than, than ourselves. So, uh, the human nature is to, to to to, to be, to be in interaction with similar people, right?

Uh, and the same way it goes to technology, I mean, uh, I believe that people will feel more comfortable and will use the, um, more frequently technology that adapts to humans and not the other way around. I mean, the fact that today we use the, the, our and our computers the way it does, like with the keywords and, uh, uh, and the mouse, right? And, and, and the screen.

It's not meant to be, it's the, the only, it's, it just the way that the computers works today. But if we could interact with an, uh, machine with the computer the same way we, we, you know, we are used to interact with other person that would probably would make more comfortable and, and, and in order. Sure.

And in order to interact with other machines, they need to understand me the same way you understand me right now, right? For example, I'm moving my heads, uh, my, my hands, and you understand way more than the words that are coming out of my mouth, right? You understand?

You know, who is Allen by singing on, on the camera. So, so if I want to you to understand me, and I want the machine to understand me, I need also to, to to, to be seen by the machine and be the machine to be able to, to interpret what the machine is seeing right now. And the other way around.

If, if I want to understand you better, I will need not only to, or, or to chat with you through text, because then we are losing a lot of information. I would love to see your voice to, sorry, to hear your voice, see your mm-hmm. Face gestures.

See your, the whole island to understand who is Allen. And if I like the machine to understand me so he can help me somehow, and we can interact, I need to be seen and I need to be able to see the other way, the, the, the other, the other party. So back to your question, I believe that, uh, uh, as humanity, we need to create, uh, an interface that is comfortable to the end user, to the humans.

And it should be as human as possible, because that's the most comfortable way to interact with. So, so besides being, uh, my personal geeky dre dream, I think the, if we want those machines, The right thing To serve us and, and to help us, they need to be similar to us because that's the way that we will feel comfortable to, to interact. Absolutely.

You know, I I I having this discussion just the other day, actually yesterday, and someone was complaining that when they get the transcript from a video and then give the transcript to an AI and say, okay, write an article, a synopsis of, of this video from the transcript, it, it, it misses so much. 'cause it misses the inference, it misses the tone, it misses the gestures. And, and so, you know, just taking a transcript of a video is, is only like half the story, right?

I think it's, people need to realize that, that it's very important if you wanna capture, you know, how do humans communicate? We don't communicate just with words, we communicate with, with expressions and gestures and, you know, cans and signals and, and, you know, inflections in voice, right? You know, I could say a word three different ways, it's the same word, but you, it could convey different emotion behind it.

And I, I think that is sort of a, a missing piece in, in how we are today, kind of taking these, you know, human to human interactions, human to machine interactions, and trying to like, uh, analyze them and, and record them, you know, for posterity. But Alan, I, I wanna turn to e self a little bit. Mm-hmm.

So this sounds like just such a great no brainer, really a no brainer. Like, who wouldn't want this for their company to be doing things like this? And you, you're helping in, in things like industry and banking and real estate.

I mean, it, you know, this has been a dream for a really long time to have this sort of intelligent avatar that you can interact with and, and, you know, help in your business. Did at ES self, have you created sort of templates that people picked from, or is each one sort of a bespoke, you know, from scratch for that particular job? That's a great question.

So the vision behind, uh, eso, uh, was kind of taken from, uh, companies like, uh, Wix, if you know them. Do you know Wix? The Yeah, the website.

A website company. So if, if, if, if you think thoroughly what they've done there, they created templates of websites. Mm-hmm.

'cause eventually they ma the world, the web world into categories. And there are eventually, uh, uh, uh, small number of templates. It might, it might be hundreds, but it's not millions.

There are eventually small hu small numbers, maybe a few hundreds of templates that define the different websites that are possible in the world. So you have like, uh, maybe, uh, uh, law firms, uh, templates accounts. You have, uh, e-commerce, you have many templates, right?

So what, what we built, and it came out also from, you know, the experience that they had in a previous company. We understood that even that we have Gene AI today and, and, uh, and, uh, the LMS are very smart and, and powerful, and they don't need to have prebuilt templates of the, the conversation graphs because the, they can go, that's, it's not a, um, closed ended solution that there can be open the questions, but still, you need to be able to, to limit those LMS and provide some guard, guard race to those LLMs to, to give some goals to those agents that they would solve specific problems. So, for example, ATIs o we have, uh, uh, AI based sales representatives.

We have customer service representatives, sorry, AI based customer service representatives. We have AI teachers, we have, uh, financial based, uh, uh, AI based financial advisors. So we do have templates because we created templates the same way, the same way that we, we created templates for the, the web of the world.

We created templates for the possible type of interactions that human will have with our avatars. So if you reach our, our, if you go to our website and you sign up to a studio, you'll see, uh, made templates, pre-built avatars, pre-built agents that are tailor made for specific industries. And then the same way that, uh, you can do at Wix, you can give, use the a template and modify it to your needs, but you don't need to be technical.

You can, you can mar you can easily modify it with a bit of prompting. So that's the way, the same thing we did at at Esof, when you clone an existing AI avatar, you already have all the integrations, all the, I would say the heavy lifting was already done behind the screens. So the only thing that you need to do right now is to, with a bit really a, uh, small effort of prompt engineering.

You, you can customize your avatar to your business to the solution that you're looking for. And, uh, that's it. It's, uh, basically takes a few minutes to integrate with your existing business and to customize and fine tune the existing solution for, for you.

Love it. I'm not asking you to give out pricing per se here, but, you know, ballpark, what does it cost for an e self sort of avatar to, you know, for, for a person's business? What should they expect to be paying for something like this?

So, so the, the move that we're taking with isso, we created a freemium model, which means that if you sign up to our studio, you will get a few free calls, free interactions that you can do with the avatar without paying us. And then you have different plans. You, you can start with, uh, basic plans of, uh, uh, and then going up to, to, to, uh, growth plans and so on.

Uh, and then if you are like a big enterprise and you did an enterprise based based solution with deeper integrations and maybe some other features that they are not available in the self service studio, uh, they usually in the customers, they reach out to us, to our sales representatives, and they, they, they give a specific quote. But for the self service studio, the price is, varies from, uh, uh, $10 a month to $200 a month. Really, those are the prices.

So, so we have, uh, tons of self service clients that we never spoke with them. Uh, and they are, because we created the weak style templates, they're self-serving their themselves in the studio. So they, they create, uh, the, their avatars, they can embed it to their websites, to application by their own.

They don't really need us. So they only pay per, uh, a monthly, uh, payment, uh, per usage. That's basically the way it works.

I love it. Alan. We're bad out time for people who want to get more information on ees self.

What's the website? ai. Es self is Ai.

It's E-S-E-L-F ai. I love it. I'm gonna play with it myself.

And maybe we'll have you back on and we could talk more about this. I have ideas. I'd like to have an avatar member of our news team.

We, we, we do a show every morning. As a matter of fact, I'm going to record it right after I'm done with you. I have to move to the next set in my studio.

It's called Textron. And we have like four or five people on every day talking about the big stories of the day. Three big stories every day.

Uh, maybe we could have an avatar be part of the gang and, and join in. That would be, oh, it's, that would be an interesting experiment. I'll, I'll reach out offline to you and see what we could do.

Sounds great. A sounds like, All righty, thank you. Keep doing what you're doing.

It's fascinating. Fun work. You know, they say if you do what you love, you never work a day in your life.

Exactly. It's, and, uh, We are not working at this sour. We, it's 100% fun.

That's the, the, that's the truth. Absolutely, man. Keep it up.

Dr. Allen Becker, very much co-founder, CEO of Esso. Thank you for being on Text Drunk tv.

Thank you, Alan. Alright, we're gonna take a break. We'll be back here on Text Drunk TV in a little bit.