Some say it takes a village to raise a child. And now, that village can include an artificial intelligence bot.
A new startup from the founder of caretaker marketplace Care.com is pitching an AI-powered household assistant to organize family calendars, schedule carpools, set doctor’s appointments, and more. Called Ohai—meant to mimic the greeting “Oh, hi”—the company emerged from stealth in January. The bot, which goes by the name “O” and costs $25 per month, is intended to lighten the load for who the company refers to as the “chief household officer.”
O is far from the first AI-powered personal assistant. Startups like Wally and Clara can draft emails and schedule work meetings, respectively. Even Siri, Apple’s assistant that has been around for more than a decade, can set reminders and update personal calendars. But there is no clear market dominator for organizing family life.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo, who founded and led Care.com as CEO for 14 years before selling it to IAC for $500 million in 2020, is behind Ohai. Its service targets the same potentially massive market as Care.com.
“It’s not like I was looking around to do another company,” Lirio Marcelo told Fortune. “For 14 years at Care.com, I knew this was a need. It’s still a problem, and the tools out there still aren’t solving it.”
Users can forward important emails to O—like those from teachers and coaches about meetings and games—and ask it to add them to the users’ personal calendars. O will scan the messages for dates and enter them automatically. Users can also ask O to find time in their schedules for a morning workout. Another potential use is for parents to text O asking to recommend a drop-off and pick-up schedule for their child based on the parents’ individual work schedules.
While nuclear families can use the tool to stay organized, Lirio Marcelo envisions the product as a resource for nontraditional families as well. Some 50% of children will see their parents separate or divorce, often resulting in children needing to travel between households and therefore requiring a lot of juggling of schedules. There are also more than 37 million people providing unpaid care for an elder in the U.S., some of whom share the responsibility with siblings or other family members. Households that employ nannies, au pairs, and babysitters may find O useful as well, Lirio Marcelo said.
There’s no app for O at the moment. Rather, users text and email their requests to the bot. Ohai is working on expanding O to multiple members per household and members at different addresses, Lirio Marcelo told Fortune.
Ohai uses foundational large language models like ChatGPT as a basis for O’s conversations, and it scraped calendars from the web to train the technology, Lirio Marcelo said. Anonymized user data also goes back into retraining the model, so it’s supposed to become smarter over time. For some new feature launches, O will shadow a human completing a task and in parallel, O tries the task itself, “which is an efficient way to train the algorithm,” she said.
Lirio Marcelo wouldn’t disclose how many customers used the product in beta but is convinced there is demand for it.
She sees the demand partly because she lives it with a busy schedule. “I got pregnant at a young age,” she said. “I’m going to be a grandmother probably later this year. My parents lived with me for 21 years, and my father had a heart attack,” whom she then had to find care for.
“That combination of being in the ‘sandwich generation’ of childcare and senior care—it all comes full circle,” she said. “Families need a lot of help.”
