Ozlo

» see ozlo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Ozlo had read about four hundred thousand restaurant menus. That was the pitch, and its founder said it plainly: the assistant knew around twenty million places in the United States and had worked through terabytes of reviews on top of the menus, until it could be asked for advice instead of for a list of links. If you told it once that you could not eat gluten, it kept that and used it the next time you asked where to go.

Charles Jolley ran platform at Facebook from 2011 to 2013, left, and was introduced to Mike Hanson by John Lilly at Greylock. The two of them started Ozlo in 2014 with the ambition of making search engines and apps unnecessary. A 14 million dollar round arrived in spring 2016 from Greylock and from Jerry Yang's AME Cloud Ventures, and on 12 October 2016 the assistant went public on iOS and the web. The press filed it as the underdog in a field where the interesting competitor, Viv, had just disappeared into Samsung.

On 31 July 2017, nine and a half months after that launch, Facebook announced it had bought Ozlo. It took the technology and most of a team of about thirty people to work on Messenger. The consumer bot and the APIs behind it were wound down.

There is a specific reason this one could never have reached me: Ozlo's knowledge was American. Twenty million places, every one of them American, and four hundred thousand menus from restaurants I could not walk into. An assistant whose entire competence is the dinner options in another country is not a product with a Turkish version waiting to be switched on.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually knew ~

The 2016 assistant race was mostly about voices and wake words. Ozlo was built from the opposite end, as a knowledge layer that happened to have a chat window on it, and the demos were deliberately unglamorous: the weather one minute, the nearest PokeStop the next, in that particular autumn of 2016. It remembered what you had told it earlier in the conversation and earlier in the week.

Jolley's framing was that an assistant should be an expert you consult, not a command line you dictate to. The menu count was the metric he quoted to reporters, ahead of anything about the voice.

~ bought for the brains ~

The archive shows how fast the switch was. The capture of ozlo.com at 21:21 UTC on 31 July 2017, the same day as the acquisition notice, is already a thank-you page: 2,316 bytes, a line about the explosion of on-the-go communication, and gratitude to customers and investors. That page then sat unchanged until 20 September 2017, after which the host started answering requests with a 400.

Facebook had spent that summer shutting its own assistant work down and buying other people's. Ozlo's knowledge layer stopped being a product, along with the two developer APIs sitting on top of it, and became internal Messenger work instead, which is the quiet version of an ending: the software kept running somewhere, under someone else's name, with nobody to ask it anything.

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