Shifu mines smartphone usage pattern to predict what you’re going to do next
For people who find managing call schedules challenging, Shifu is a big relief. It’s a context aware personal assistant for your smartphone.
Shifu mines your usage data to predict what you are going to do next and make relevant suggestion. It knows who you will be calling next and it brings those contacts to you without you having to search them in the phone book.
Importantly, it knows when you are free to make calls and reminds you to return the calls you missed. The app also reminds you to charge your phone but sufficiently ahead of your time of heavy usage, not when you run out of
battery.“We launched Shifu in the Google Play Store sometime back and life hackers call it ‘one of the best to do list manager in Android’,” says Prashant Singh, Co-founder and CEO of Signals. Signals is the company behind Shifu.
The core idea behind Shifu is to make your smartphone experience more intuitive, personalize and anticipatory by making use of your data usage. Shifu mines your usage data to predict what you are going to do next.
Founded by Prashant, Deepansh Jain and Michael Massey, Shifu enables your phone to understand and adopt according to you and make it truly personalized.
Before starting Signals, Prashant was heading product and partnerships at a leading app publisher in India and helped develop a portfolio of apps which got more than 50 million downloads.
“You can think of Shifu like a smart task/ to-do list which learn from your usage pattern, anticipates your need and makes relevant suggestions about apps, contacts, tasks without you having to look for them,” states Prashant. These recommendations depend on everything from usage history to your location to the time of day and your individual preference.
“We call our colleagues during the day, spouse in the evening, friend and family on weekends. But our phone books don’t understand and adopt based on this information,” points out Prashant.
Shifu anticipates who you are most likely to call at any given point of time and keep these contacts in notification bar so that you can access them immediately without having to search in the phone book.
Besides call prediction, the app includes features such as call snooze and smart battery alerts.
While call snooze keeps track of missed calls you need to return, smart battery alert analyzes your battery consumption habit and reminds you to charge your phone well ahead of time.
Shifu raised a round of funding from veteran tech entrepreneur based in Delhi (NCR) along with two other angels from UAE and Silicon Valley. At present, the company focuses on getting its product into as many phones as possible.
Shifu competes with Google calendar which offers reminder and alert integration, Any.do, and other various to-do and reminder apps. Currently, the company isn’t focusing on revenue generation. However, in the future it can monetize the platform by offering it to developers who can develop relevant apps around users’ data collected by Shifu.
