Two lads working with DreamIt Ventures, Aaron Ting and Jarod Stewart, have built something called Winston. Winston is a conversational assistant that deals in information. He will wake you up with a morning briefing about the current news and weather as well as notes from your social feed. Think of it as one of those windows in sci-fi movies that light up in the morning and give the hero the bad news that he/she is wanted by the intergalactic police.
“Winston is a marriage of Conversational Interface and Flipboard-style web content cohesion; we think this combination is really different and extremely compelling,” said Ting.
The company received $25,000 from DreamIt and just opened a $500,000 note.
“We were thinking about Smart TVs, and realized that even if you put a really sophisticated web browser on a Smart TV, a lot of your online social addictions and news addictions are lean-forward, text-heavy experiences that you wouldn’t want to consume from your couch. So we decided to build an app that could take all of this text-heavy content and turn it into an audiovisual newscast – an experience that you can listen to and watch.”
Interaction with Winston is fairly limited. Think of it as calling your assistant into the room and asking for a rundown of the day’s happenings. You’ll learn various bits of information without having to squint at your phone and you can enable Winston while driving or before bed.
“Winston will brighten your mornings with a beautiful audiovisual news briefing. During the day, you’ll be able to drive safely while staying tuned to your social updates using Winston’s ‘eyes-free’ mode,” said Ting.
The app is currently in its relative infancy but you can try it out at GetWinston.com.