Three videos. Nearly four decades. One inevitable idea — that AI should help us care for the people we love, with humans always at the helm.
In 1987, Apple made a video showing a talking avatar on a professor's laptop — always on, always listening, proactive when it needed to be. The avatar conversed like a human with the professor, helping him work and communicate with his mother and friends.
For the AI Presence team, Knowledge Navigator demonstrated something no consumer voice agent has achieved since: a configurable voice-AI that speaks to users proactively, not just when spoken to, decades before Siri or Alexa or Google Assistant — all of which still support only a prompt-response model, just like today's major LLMs.
In late 2016, Chuck Goldman, a visionary entrepreneur who started his career at Apple, introduced Stu to Artemis: his vision for a proactive, ambient voice companion. At the time, Stu and his wife Lisa were caring for her mom, who lived nearby at a Brookdale facility. Both instantly saw how an Artemis-like agent could help Lisa monitor her mom — and simultaneously help her mom, and a close friend with failing eyesight, live more happily and independently.
With 25+ years in voice AI, Stu also recognized what was totally new: a proactive ambient agent could serve two different users in two different ways via one service — and offer a voice-only experience to the one who needed it most. The Artemis video, however, begged one question: how would it know exactly what to say and when?
Stu launched LifePod in 2017 to answer that question. Built on the Artemis vision by a team of voice veterans, LifePod gave caregivers a web portal to schedule proactive voice dialogs on behalf of their loved ones, thus becoming the world's first configurable, proactive voice-AI companion for older adults aging in place. LifePod originally worked as an Alexa Skill, enabling an Amazon partnership from 2017–2019. But Amazon, repeatedly accused of misusing consumer data and violating users' privacy, was reluctant to support LifePod's proactive skill in production — which motivated LifePod to build and launch its own independent voice cloud, using a smart speaker from iHome, in 2019.
In late 2020, LifePod was acquired by its largest customer, institutional care provider CCA (now CareSource). They struggled, however, to integrate LifePod data and alerts into their internal systems and caregiver workflows. Budget cuts followed and LifePod was mothballed in 2022.
In retrospect, the vision was right but the go-to-market was inverted — DTC can and should lead B2B2C. The voice AI we needed — LLMs with human-quality TTS — wasn't available until two years later. Now it is, and we're using it, along with everything learned at LifePod, to build Holo and AI Presence.
We're seeking mission-aligned investors to participate in our seed round. If you believe, as we do, that we should use AI and the internet for the greatest good — to help others — then please join us.