Duckbill blends AI and human intelligence for personal assistant service

A new personal assistant service called Duckbill can help schedule your dental appointments, find creative gifts for your loved ones, and plan your next vacation or home repair.

And while Duckbill does use AI internally, it’s not just another alternative to ChatGPT or Siri. The company harnesses large language model AI as an aid to its network of human assistants, dubbed copilots, helping them respond to requests and get tasks done more efficiently.

“Right now, 100% of the interaction is with a real human, and the LLM horsepower is on the back, powering those humans to work more efficiently and effectively,” says Duckbill cofounder and CEO Meghan Joyce, though in the future the LLMs are also likely to help gather information when subscribers first put in requests. AI can also help spot when you might need a particular service, such as by scanning your calendar for whether you have your next dental cleaning scheduled roughly six months after your prior one.

An online assistant has long been a dream for busy professionals and companies looking to cater to them, but so far most services have been relatively limited in scope. Companies have mostly come to specialize in particular areas of expertise, like TaskRabbit’s focus on furniture assembly and home repairs, or credit card concierges’ emphasis on reservations and ticketing, while purely digital assistants like Siri, Alexa, and ChatGPT remain limited in what they can do in the tangible world.

Joyce, formerly COO at Oscar Health, says the time for a general purpose assistant service has come, thanks to the efficiencies brought about by LLMs and by the general push to put more goods and services online in recent years, making it easier for assistants to find and dispatch whatever customers need.

“During COVID, anything that wasn’t already digitized became digitized,” she says.

Duckbill, which raised roughly $25 million in Series A funding, recently became publicly available after roughly a year of beta testing. During that time its copilots have helped carry out thousands of tasks, from researching long-term care providers for users’ parents to helping people order recycling bins that fit their garage spaces to reserving an Irish castle for an event. 

Joyce says most tasks can be placed into one of about 70 categories, making it possible to build standardized workflows for handling them.

“The beauty of these workflows is that they will allow us to use technology to take the task as far as possible,” she says, before a human takes over. Having a human in the loop also ensures AI systems are behaving correctly and giving the right answers, without the risk of hallucinated answers to questions. And different human copilots can be dispatched for different types of tasks, like resolving a medical billing dispute versus making a restaurant reservation.

Duckbill customer Ada Zhang, a recent graduate of Northeastern University, says she started using the service after seeing Joyce speak on a panel at a women in business event. She’s used Duckbill for tasks like placing orders and scheduling doctor’s appointments, and had praise for the copilots’ professionalism. And, she says, the service really shined when a property her family owned had an unexpected mold issue, and Duckbill was able to quickly book competent contractors to take care of the problem.

“We didn’t know any plumbers—we didn’t know any mold removal specialists,” she says. “They were able to hook me up with someone the same day.”

To Kirsten Green, founder and managing partner of Forerunner Ventures, which led Duckbill’s Series A round, the market for Duckbill’s services is large—essentially anyone who could “benefit from being more efficient with their time,” she says.

“That’s everybody from the student to the young person navigating their early career to the busy parents that are managing a household,” she says, “and anyone that’s in business.”

Of course, potential users still have to balance the value they’re getting against the price. At the moment, Duckbill offers subscriptions ranging from a $99-per-month plan with one user able to submit tasks via app, text or email for next-business-day replies to a $449 plan that gives four people “prioritized responses and completion” plus “unlimited calls with a dedicated copilot.” 

But as the product continues to evolve and find ways to more efficiently harness increasingly powerful AI, Joyce envisions lower-priced plans becoming available.

“Where we’re starting is akin to the Uber Black version of the product,” she says. “What I’m really excited about is introducing this product into the mass market.”