Marsbot: Building a Personal Assistant

Foursquare recently launched Marsbot, an SMS-based app for local recommendations. Marsbot is an intelligent friend that lives in your pocket and learns about you through the places you go in the real world. While this product is aligned with Foursquare's long-standing mission to find the best places, it represents a new era in the way people interact with recommendation engines. The promise of the latest crop of personal assistants is get us information more quickly and seamlessly, but building them comes with many challenges. In this talk, we discuss why we built Marsbot and some of the many lessons learned along the way.