To begin with, let’s look at who started Luka, and where they came from. Luka was co-founded by Philip Dudchuk and Eugenia Kuyda. According to Dudchuk’s LinkedIn profile, he was previously CEO of “General Rhetoric”, a spin-off software company building a conversational chat bot for a new bank. Whereas, Kuyda worked on the content side in writing and editing. Both in Russia.
According to Kuyda, “We elevate social discovery from taxing inputs to a fluid, natural conversation, and our machine learning system helps us ‘forever learn’ user preferences so the recommendations only sharpens with repeated use. If a user is a vegetarian on a budget, IO will never forget that.” (Luka was previously re-branded from ‘IO’.)
References:
- App Uses Powerful AI to Find Perfect Places for You to Eat (Feb 2015)
- New App Luka Uses Artificial Intelligence to Make Restaurant Recommendations(Feb 2015)
- IO launches an NYC beta for its chat-based AI assistant [invites] (Nov 2014)
- IO Feels Like A Human Friend Who Gives Great Restaurant Recommendations(Oct 2014)
- Russia’s IO to relocate to NYC, prepares to launch “Her”-style intelligent local discovery platform (Oct 2014)