Simile Develops AI for Digital Polling

Jakarta (ANTARA) — The startup technology company Simile is developing artificial intelligence (AI) technology to generate digital polling. The company is said to have secured USD 100 million in venture capital from Index Ventures, according to a Wall Street Journal report carried by Gizmodo on Sunday. Simile founder Joon Park said they are ‘developing a base model that predicts human behaviour in any situation, at any scale.’ The system trains AI agents through everyday-chat-style interviews to digitally imitate real humans. The technology is inspired by the video game The Sims to simulate everyday reality in natural interactions of generative agents. ‘We sample generative agents to fill an interactive sandbox environment inspired by The Sims. There, end users can interact with a town of twenty-five agents using natural language,’ the paper’s abstract states. The digital agents have overarching aims and can interact with each other without following a programmed path. Health retail company such as CVS is said to be interested in using the digital sources service to understand customer experiences in depth. Using AI enables researchers to ask questions endlessly because digital assistants do not experience fatigue. CVS even plans to expand their simulated respondent pool to one hundred thousand in the near future to test store layouts and new product designs using those simulated groups. Simile has also forged strategic partnerships with polling organisation Gallup to simulate public polling to yield model decisions that are transparent and empirically validated against real-world sentiment.