Dazzle Uses Camera Photos as AI Context
Marissa Mayer’s startup Dazzle is building a consumer AI assistant for non-technical users. The company says users can start with a photo and receive suggestions for everyday tasks, including purchases, repairs and recipes; it can also buy with approval and schedule repairs. Dazzle describes camera-roll photos as personal context, avoiding the broad access to texts, emails and documents sought by many AI agents. Mayer also told The New York Times that she used Dazzle to generate three descriptions of her daughter for her 10th-birthday celebration.
Dazzle offers a photo-first alternative to AI agents that request access to users’ texts, emails and documents, while presenting the camera roll as a source of personal context.
Marissa Mayer, the original Silicon Valley girlboss, is back with a new artificial intelligence tool specifically for moms. Specifically, moms who don’t really like doing mom stuff.
In a profile of Mayer and her new AI assistant, called Dazzle, the New York Times provided an anecdote, presumably passed on to the reporter by Mayer herself, to highlight how this agent has made her life easier—though, if anything, it shows Mayer performing the exact kind of cognitive offloading that any AI tool worth its salt should free us up to focus on rather than doing for us.
Per The Times, Mayer said that she was asked by her daughter’s teacher to come up with three things that make her daughter special as part of a celebration of her daughter’s 10th birthday. Mayer, apparently feeling overwhelmed by the task, asked Dazzle to do it for her. “It came back and was like, your daughter is empathetic, creative and an animal lover,” Mayer told the Times. Surely, her daughter will appreciate learning that an AI model scraped through her mom’s photos of her to come up with those because her mom couldn’t be bothered.