Search without the search engine, life after Google and an AI in your browser are different ways of saying the same thing. What it comes down to is Context Scout’s core belief that there are enough contextual clues in your online behaviour that information should be seamlessly curated and delivered to you when you need it. This is what we’ve worked on for 2 years and myself personally for over 7 years. In this past year, we had enough resources to finally solve some of the hardest, most crucial problems that stood in our way.

Context Scout spent most of 2017 digging a big hole in the ground, and now we’re building a frame, and fast. But progress is hidden when you’re underground, so here’s what we’re been up to this past year.

What We’ve Built

• A prototype AI that is embedded in your web browser, understands the work you’re doing online and figures out how to help you
• State-of-the-art NLP algorithms that use the latest deep learning research to identify entities on webpages
• An engine that can build task-oriented semantic knowledge graphs in real-time based on web usage

• An infrastructure for automatically connecting a user’s task to any website, API or database through our bespoke (and soon-to-be patented) integration framework
• Hundreds of prototypes and designs in order to find the most intuitive and helpful way to assist users using this powerful engine
• An almost-ready MVP that is currently able to assist recruiters and investors by summarising key facts on webpages, automatically finding new facts about people and companies from the web and saving this information to a database or CRM

How is it Being Used

• Just now, we have beta testers from 3 countries using our prototype. They interact with the tool on average 7.08 times a day (and rising)

• We’ve extracted 240000 entities and 294000 relations from 16000 webpages across 11500 distinct workflows
• With this unique dataset we’ve been able to begin research on extracting usage characteristics that will personalise each user’s individual experience
• Our users can already connect Context Scout to 10 services: Google Sheets and Calendar, Beamery, Thomson Reuters, GitHub, Lusha, Workable, StackOverflow, Wikipedia and FullContact

What We Achieved

• We were awarded a £500k Innovate UK grant (as part of the UK government’s strategic investment into robotics and AI) in collaboration with UCL (the UK’s highest ranked Computer Science department) to continue our research into online workflow assistance
• We were selected by the UK Department of International Trade (DIT) to represent the UK on a Trade Mission to TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, as well as presenting our technology at the Grace Hopper and Web Search and Data Mining Conferences
• We submitted 3 patent applications
• Published our first research paper and open source code

Team Context Scout

• We’ve grown into a team of 6, our newest members are Emily, our product designer who joins us from the Cortana team at Microsoft, and Chris, our full-stack engineer, founder of 3 companies and alumni from both EF and YC
• We’ll soon be joined by Mohammad who’ll be working for UCL as a post-doc in collaboration with us on our grant project, and we’re currently looking for a lead engineer

What We’ll be Doing in 2018

• Onboarding new testers onto our prototype each week, we currently have 1700 more lined up
• Publicly re-launching our product back into the recruitment market
• New features in the pipeline including on-webpage UI and interactions, task management and contextual auto-suggest
• Also launching our enterprise workflow analytics toolkit into a pilot program with some of the 25+ enterprises we’ve engaged with in the past year
• More patents, papers and publications
• We are likely to be fundraising by the end of the year, there’ll be more news on this as the year progresses

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Our mission at Context Scout is to build what comes after search. The foundations are now in place, the scaffolding has gone up and the frame is under construction. In 2018, you’ll be hearing a lot more from us as we expand our userbase and publicly release our technology. We’ll be making some big announcements over the next couple of months — until then, Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year!