Customer Interview: Gene B, The Systems Thinker.

Category: Technology and Productivity

Tags: Content managementProduct featuresRecall appUser experienceVideo summarization

Entities: ChatGPTDr. GrigerEgoGeneNvidiaOpenAIPaulRecallSThe BrainYouTube

Transcript

00:00

Um, so hi everyone. I'm S.

Uh, I'm one of the co-founders of Recall and I've been having these really amazing customer calls. Uh, I learn a lot on them and I thought it would be useful to start recording them and have some of the use cases from some of our top users

00:17

here. And so today I have Gan joining us.

Uh, Jean, why don't you kick us off with a bit of an introduction to yourself? I'm fascinated by relationships and their implications which from my perspective

00:32

is the basis for understanding anything and everything. And I build models.

I build lots of models. Um usually some people call them causal diagrams.

I just call them relationship models. And

00:49

I build many every day. And some of them I post on LinkedIn and some of them I won't let out of the box.

But and I've been doing it for 50 years now. So amazing.

Gene, what what problem were you facing when

01:05

you stumbled upon recall or what were you looking for when you found us? I was I was not looking for anything when I found recall.

Okay. I stumbled across it because I watch at least a dozen YouTube videos every

01:21

day trying to keep up on various and sunundry things and and it just caught me. I said, "Really?" And and then I watched six or seven other videos about recall

01:38

and then I found out that it had been around for 18 months and I was really upset because I could have been using it a long time ago. There's a certain series of things that it does that I haven't

01:54

found someplace else collectively, right? I mean, you find you find pieces of capabilities in different places, but they're not all wired together.

I've had a 29-year lovehate relationship with

02:09

a piece of software called the brain to the point where I mean, it has an interface that is so freaking seductive, but it was never what I wanted it to be. So, after months of use, I would delete it and then a few months it would be

02:25

back again. So it was just certain aspects of recall that we are going to talk about that connected really really well.

I mean if you're comfortable Gene I'd love if you'd share your screen and maybe walk us through like your typical

02:41

use case uh of recall and we can sort of take it from there. I said that I watch a dozen YouTube videos a day.

02:56

These are all the ones I watched last night on um from cancer remission. This I happened to catch this one video by this woman and it seems so good that I watched a whole bunch of them.

And then

03:12

the question is what do you do with it? Well, it's wonderful because here is the concise summary of the video and when I look at the concise summary, sometimes it's enough and sometimes it

03:27

isn't. But I can always go to chat and tell it that I want a detailed summary of the same video and it will give me that and I can then use that in terms of if you go to to u to health.

03:45

Um I'm a great fan of of Dr. Griger.

And I'm also a great fan of this woman who's a doctor who does videos about food. And okay, who who is out of curiosity?

04:02

You know what you could do? You could also share it with me.

If you open up one of the links, you could just uh share the your recall link with me. Share.

Copy link. Yeah, you can just pop that in the chat.

So, I'll save it to my

04:17

recall. Couple of aspects that that I was really fascinated with was it will it will summarize the video whether or not there's a transcript for it or not, which in several instances I

04:33

have found things that there aren't transcripts for. And I liked the way that it summarized them for me.

I like the way that when it does the concise summary, it keeps the the

04:49

timestamps on the pieces. So I if I'm interested, I can go to a specific spot in the video to take a look at it.

Um, what else I like is I like the chat. I

05:04

am not interested in recall becoming notebook LM. Okay.

Mhm. They're different products for different intents.

I like the ability to chat with the video. I understand that the

05:19

developers are working on the ability to chat with my entire repository though from my perspective because the set of content that I am growing is so diverse I don't see any

05:38

utility in in conversing with the entire repository. Okay.

Okay. What would what would make sense to me would be to say let me converse with my health

05:53

repository or if I go to economics or what I go to economics and down here to MMT. Let me converse

06:11

with everything that I've stored under MMT, which is a lot. If I did Kelton and Ray, I would get all of them.

Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. And and being able to converse with that set of content I

06:28

would find extremely meaningful as we're gonna have that, Jean. So basically when we have chat you'll be able to say I want to chat with my notes under Kelton and under Rey and I want a summary of those notes you know so you'll be able

06:43

to define the context in which you have that conversation. Sounds like magic.

Okay. I'm excited.

I'm really really excited. I actually got a demo from Ego, our CTO, a couple days ago and I was like, this

07:00

is uh this is going to be exciting. Especially because I don't think you take your own notes in recall, right?

You're only saving external content. Is that right?

Oh, no. I have so I have some of my own notes.

Okay. Okay.

Awesome. Because that's why I actually think it's so powerful because I have notes I've created myself and I love

07:17

combining that with also notes that I've been saving. Uh so that combination and being able to sort of have that conversation I think will be really powerful.

Here here are my notes on recall. Ah okay.

Okay. Okay.

And

07:33

and there's I actually had it create a quiz on your own notes. On my own notes.

Yeah. Okay.

Which which I after a time after going through it a few times I actually deleted. Okay.

Though though

07:51

the surprising thing was I got this answers to some of the questions on my own notes wrong. Okay.

Which is really disturbing. Okay.

It says wait a minute. Did did you really

08:07

create these notes? It wasn't a problem with the questions.

It was in fact I didn't remember what I put in the notes. I mean honestly this happens.

This happens. And so

08:23

the extent you've been on a streak, you've been on a good streak, but I've been doing some other things for the last two weeks. So I see that I realized that after a while I had to

08:38

decide. I mean, there was like two dozen sets of quizzes in here.

I had to finally say, uh, well, these it's enough of these, these, and these, so delete these and get them out because it never

08:54

stops. Okay.

Yeah. With um spaced repetition.

I mean, it just And you know, if you if you get it wrong, it will ask you that question forever. Forever.

Yeah, that's true.

09:10

It's really hard to to to get out of the once you're getting it wrong. uh offic which is not a bad thing.

Okay. Yeah, it's annoying.

Yeah, it's annoying. It's not a bad thing.

It's annoying. What's annoying is then I keep getting

09:26

it wrong and then I because I think I get so angry that I've been asked the same question. I'm like and then I keep getting it wrong and then I know I'm going to keep seeing it even more.

I've also gotten to that point where some cards I'm like I was learning about Sertuins um like I think it's like a longevity protein. This is for some reason it's

09:42

not sticking. I did I had to delete the card out of my review because I'm like I'm actually just not going to get this one right.

Um the other part that I I still sort of trip over

09:59

is the difference between a taxonomy and an ontology. Okay.

This is a taxonomy. Yeah.

All of these all of these pieces are here because they have

10:15

tags on them that makes them end up here. This is an ontology based upon the connections

10:33

that exist within the content. Mhm.

Like this is Chad GPT. So that if I look at the the graph for this, it connects to GPT and and open AI.

Okay. Um so basically we

10:50

weren't even sure should we show users this or should we actually keep it hidden because the whole foundation of recall is built on this graph database. So let's say do you have augmented browsing installed?

Sure. Yeah.

Uh, so if we can we open a

11:07

page that you know you've had some links on maybe if we just hover. Oh, there we go.

So, Nvidia, right? So, basically the utility from the visual graph we need to build.

You should be able to I

11:23

think we'll do I mean we'll do a full revamp of it visually but we should be able to enable you to search it interact with it add it download it and have a lot more usefulness that you're going to get maybe even what I would love is almost a summary of the graph here so I

11:40

can almost read so maybe I'll have the visual and then I'll also have like a text summary to read it but the reason I suggested you open augmented browsing is because the way the utility is slowly surfacing is in ways like this. So it it's not using the visual representation, it's

11:56

using the foundation of the foundation of a graph view that's enabling us to find connections while you read and then say, "Oh, uh, you know, this is a no-brainer for Nvidia, but maybe you're researching NVIDIA and you actually want to keep top of mind all the other

12:12

articles that have mentioned Nvidia." And now you can see you've had three different things mentioned. Maybe as you're scrolling, you're like, "Oh, this hugging face article I actually forgot about." Maybe you'd want to click on it and it would actually take you back to exactly where Nvidia was mentioned.

Um,

12:28

absolutely. I'll say a couple things about augmented browsing.

It's um it's it's local first. So, when we pick up those keywords, like in this case, Nvidia, there's no LLM doing that because we didn't put an LLM in the browser.

That's just logic that Paul had

12:45

written. And that's why honestly it needs work.

This was just the beta because we weren't actually even sure would pe would this resonate. Is this something people even want?

Uh and we've actually been getting pretty positive feedback. So I think as we invest more in it uh we can ensure that there's more

13:02

relevance. You'd be able to customize it.

Um so yeah, I think it's I think it's coming. Uh it's coming for sure.

Jean, so would you say the only benefit right now is maybe just curiosity or playing with it? Is it peace of mind

13:18

that it's a place to save? Uh, is it timesaving at all?

I'm just curious way. No, it's it's far more than a curiosity.

Okay. Okay.

So, um Oh, I have to do this. The

13:35

I have I have a lot of Zoom calls. I can go ahead after the call.

I drop the video in here. Recall does a summary.

So when I send Phil back the

13:52

link to the video, I also send him the summary from here. This is because I don't like I don't like the summaries that anybody else has done.

So, um, to be able to have them here, to be able to chat with

14:11

the video or chat with the content of the Zoom call that that we had. Um, that's cool.

Okay. I find that utility.

I'm a real fan of the spaced repetition.

14:30

Mhm. I I really like the difference between the taxonomy and and in the ontology.

Yeah. Mhm.

It's what happens when you get old, you know, you can't remember. That's okay.

Um, so,

14:47

um, I appreciate the difference between the two. And it's it's a learning curve on my part.

Mhm. And I have a lot of hope for what I see as as the

15:06

potential for me being able to use it better as I understand it more. the the whole the the idea that to to be able to c curate the taxonomy

15:22

some of these things that I have in here should probably go in three or four different places and all I have to do is add the tags to them to get it to do that. But back again we're back to the problem of me actually having the discipline to curate the taxonomy.

Yeah,

15:40

I hear you. Um, Jean, just how did you get your uh meeting in here?

You upload your meetings to YouTube? Like you have a private playlist that you upload them into and then you put it into recall.

I I record I try to record most all of

15:58

Are you recording this? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Of course. Of course.

Okay. So, I record my Zoom calls and I drop them into YouTube unlisted so nobody can find them.

Okay. Okay.

I have to put them someplace. Yeah.

And and I want to share

16:15

them with whoever I had the Zoom call with. That's super cool.

That's a great That's a great use case. Jean, we could wrap up with um any advice you have to new users, any core features that are those wish list.

Um anything like that

16:32

that you'd like to share I think would be helpful. Um yeah.

Try it. You'll like it.

I showed it to somebody this morning and it was like

16:47

Pavlov's dog. I mean, it was like the the the comment that I got back 20 minutes later was, "Wow.