AUSTIN — Austin is a town that thrives on technology and has many different companies pushing the boundaries. This includes some Austinites who are a part of one company working to use history to create something innovative for the present.
Nicholas Head lives in Austin and is the executive producer for the company "Calm," which has created a meditation, sleep and mental wellness app.
"As adults, we grow up and tend to let go of recess, summer breaks and nap time," Head said. "We then replace it with meetings, emails, and deadlines. We wanted to offer something a little bit fun and different."
The app includes music, classes and stories that all try to provide a way for you to mitigate the stress in your life. Named the 2017 iPhone app of the year, Calm has amassed more than 25 million downloads since its creation in 2012.
"There will always be sleeping aids and sleeping pills, but most of them have awful side effects that are worse than just being tired," Head said. "What's so nice about these is there are no side effects other than a good night's sleep."
Austinite Veronica Veloria travels a lot for work and sometimes struggles to get a good night's sleep herself.
"I realized I had a need for meditation and relaxation," Veronica said. "A little bit of guidance."
She found that guidance after a friend introduced her to Calm, and she started using it when she went to bed and when she was starting her day as well.
"As soon as I tried it, I fell in love," Veloria said. "There's so much hustle and bustle every day, so it's nice to really have some sort of cadence to go off of. Their voices are deep and they're calming, and they just kind of sooth you."
The Calm app includes a wide variety of stories that are about 20-30 minutes long. Head said based on feedback from users, most people get through about six minutes of a story before they fall asleep.
Out of all the stories on the app, though, there is one that sticks out: "The Princess and the Fox."
This story was created by an artificial intelligence, predictive text program called Voicebox.
"They took all the existing Grimm Fairy Tales, and they fed them into this artificial intelligence program," Head said.
Head and his Calm team worked with the company Botnik to create the first Brothers Grimm fairy tale in 200 years and the first bedtime story ever generated by artificial intelligence. Botnik is a company built of writer, artists and developers that use the artificial intelligence, Voicebox, to create all types of new "things" on the internet -- but they're created by a machine.
Jamie Brew is the CEO and Founder of Botnik and he said the key to this technology is finding the right foundation of information -- like Brothers Grimm fairy tales.
"Finding that format that we all know about and then stripping it of all its content and putting something completely new in there," Brew said. "The system then repeatedly gives you a range of options that are likely to continue your sentence within a certain context."
Voicebox works in a similar way to predictive text on your phone when it suggests the next word for you to use. With Voicebox, though, it suggests words and phrases based on the writing of a particular author that has been fed into the system. Eventually, it creates a whole new, similarly-written story.
"I think a lot of people see AI as agents," Brew said. "People see them as rivals or maybe collaborators at best. I think both of those are a little bit confusing because when we work with machines, I don't see the interface as another person or another actor... I don't see the progression of machines getting more and more powerful and more able to compete with us. I see it as a system of two -- evolving together."
Right now, this literary cloning still has some kinks to work out, as both Botnik and Calm had a team of three writers or editors (which included both Head and Brew) that cleaned up the text and made it a little more coherent.
"You can see one of the phrases here -- 'it's as beautiful as a magician,'" Head said, pointing to the first draft of The "Princess and the Fox." "Going through, you'd change it to, 'it's magnificent' or something like that."
For Head, though, he said he can see this technology ramping up and becoming more independent as well.
"As that gets more and more trained and more and more advanced, it's going to require less and less editing to where maybe we do get to the point when we can have it just polish out a whole story," Head said. "I think it will get to the point where we don't even need that collaboration.