Earlier this month, former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Marissa Mayer told me that she was finally ready to launch Dazzle – a personal AI assistant that completed a $8 million seed funding round in December last year – and I can’t help but wonder if she is imitating the Meta’s Muse, Instinct, as well as the wave of similar tools that have emerged over the past month.
But when Mayer finally demonstrated it to me, Dazzle proved that it took a different approach. Instead of building a context about you from text-based applications such as emails, calendars, and shopping history, it obtained all the context from just one source: your phone’s photo album.
"I believe that photos are an underappreciated source of information," Mayer said, "You would be surprised by how much we can learn about you from them, and how well we can do things just based on your photos alone."
Meyer believes that if one photo is worth a thousand words, then your album is worth millions of words. Dazzle claims that by analyzing all the photos stored in your phone, it can understand your hobbies, interests, food and style preferences, how you like to pass your time, and who you spend that time with.
“We can understand whether you like skiing, where you went on your last trip, and what type of things your children like,” Mayer said.
It’s not surprising that Mayer has created an assistant around photos. Her previous startup, Sunshine, launched a photo-sharing tool called Shine in 2024 that was powered by AI. Although that product was widely criticized for its outdated design, failed to gain widespread use, and was eventually shut down, Mayer stated that it still accumulated “interesting intellectual property.”
I really want to give Dazzle a try. Users can interact with it through its app as well as via text messages. Dazzle divides its functions into two core experiences. For immediate tasks, it can scan recent photos to extract details—for example, automatically filling in your calendar based on event flyers, or helping you find a repairperson after spotting a broken garage door in your album.
Secondly, it will scour your photo library to come up with personalized suggestions for a variety of things, from vacation trips to birthday gifts.
Considering that there are already quite a few tools that can parse images—such as those that can find where a particular product can be purchased or search for information about an interesting work of art—I'm more interested in testing what, exactly, Dazzle can learn from my photo history.
For example, Mayer uses Dazzle to come up with ideas for family trips. She said that by scanning her photos, this assistant inferred that her family enjoyed escape rooms very much, and then recommended several locations in the San Francisco Bay Area that she had never heard of before.
When I asked Dazzle to recommend vacation destinations, it suggested several Mediterranean locations, probably based on my past trips to Spain and Greece. However, it also recommended Sicily, which surprised me a bit since I had been there four years ago. After trying a few more times, I realized it has its blind spots too – when I asked if I should buy a pair of roller skates for my daughter on her next birthday, it failed to remember that she could already skate.
However, despite these small issues, I still like the activity suggestions given by Dazzle, such as recommending local pottery studios or the night glow kayak tour in Tomales Bay ( Tomales Bay ).
I believe this product will improve over time. Although I haven't decided yet whether to continue using it or not, I like the suggestions it provides; they are more personalized compared to those AI assistants that only know about your calendar and emails.
At the same time, Mayer believes that given security concerns regarding products such as Instinct and Muse, users might be more inclined to entrust their photo libraries to AI rather than allowing it access to sensitive data such as emails and messages.
She emphasized that Dazzle prioritizes privacy and will discard any personal information that is marked as sensitive by AI.
This wave of the concentrated emergence of new AI assistants represents an exciting time for consumers. Although Dazzle is not as versatile as other products at present, it gives us a glimpse of a future where AI can do more than just execute tasks; it truly understands who you are.
