Former Plaud exec raises $26M for AI app that listens to you in the background

Mo said that users can turn off ambient data capture on Ambi’s apps and devices at any time, and the feature is off by default. The startup said it doesn’t store any recordings of users and encrypts the data, but it didn’t specify what kind of encryption it uses. Despite these measures, the onus of declaring ambient capture is still on the users. He classified this as an industry-wide problem.

“We have to inform our users that they have to tell others about ambient capture. We, as an industry, haven’t solved this problem . We have tried to put the information about disclosure in every place possible, but if users try to hide the capture, we can’t just solve the problem,” he said.

Ambi currently has over 50 staff across offices in San Francisco, Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen. The company is hiring for its go-to-market function and AI engineers for working on speech recognition models.