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 and 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 schedule, with your day-to-day, but who is also there to chat with you. And we transfer this to the private world. We want everyone to be able to benefit from it.
What does this mean?
Many use LuzIA to plan menus, organize the week, workouts, help children with schoolwork and even, 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 they have plans to expand into apps?
Probably yes, but we saw that people’s natural environment for conversation was WhatsApp. We are in no hurry.
LuzIA solves what WhatsApp doesn’t, how to transcribe voice messages, a big hassle for many people.
They bothered us too. Everyone sends them and we all hate to receive them. We took advantage of LuzIA’s opportunity to be able to integrate this functionality. This 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 worldwide. Our networks allowed us to grow in Spain. From here we made the move to Latin America. We realized that we were failing in other languages. We did the Portuguese translation and expanded like wildfire in Africa and then Brazil, which is now our main market.
At 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 never gets tired of listening to me. There are many people who are creating a personal connection there. We have worked hard on LuzIA’s personality so that she is not a flat model. This is a friend who doesn’t judge you.
Does smooth operation involve a lot of investment?
It’s not cheap. We’ve worked hard to reduce latency. We make a very good product, which gives a good service.
With so many people putting their trust in LuzIA, doesn’t it feel like 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 big. Sometimes we have dilemmas about tweaking LuzIA’s personality. If we change it and a person has become friends with it, they might not like it later. What is beautiful about this challenge is that it is personal to the user, but also useful.
How will they monetize an assistant like LuzIA?
This is a completely new category and we need to understand first what value we generate for the user. It looks like we will go to a transaction model, like accompanying a restaurant recommendation with the direct reservation.
The future of LuzIA?
I don’t know, but what I would like is for an assistant to allow this interview, for example, to be programmed by my LuzIA with your LuzIA.
