A team of former Twitter employees recently launched a new app called Rex. Designed as a consumer social app, Rex allows users to share their personal recommendations of places to visit.
Users can share their thoughts and recommendations for restaurants, museums, bars, parks, and even trails.
They can also share their thoughts on various businesses they interact with.
AI Makes Getting Started With Rex a Breeze
Rex was designed to use a combination of AI and computer vision technologies. As such, it can make it easier for users to start sharing their recommendations simply by scouring the phones’ camera rolls for photos from their favorite spots.
Users can create special, curated playlists and then share them with family and friends.
Rex also uses a proprietary machine learning model trained on computer vision on images. That way it can determine what recommendations users might have to share.
The machine learning model seeks images of places and then uses the metadata to determine if the place is something worth sharing.
For example, if someone takes a photo of a dish in a restaurant, the photo would go through this process.
Of course, the artificial intelligence-powered app is also using other signals, including coordinates and timestamps.
With all of this data together, it attempts to put together the best guess regarding when and where the photo was taken.
On the user’s end, they can find or take a photo of the place they wish to recommend, enter some text about why they recommend it and publish it.
Ex-Twitter Employees Build Their Own App Using AI
The app was created by a former Twitter product manager, Aliza Rosen, who founded the project in 2021.
Rosen also started the initiative to boost Twitter’s character limit from 140 to 280.
Today my team and I are so excited to introduce @rexapp, a new app to help you discover, keep track of, and share places you love with friends. (1/7) pic.twitter.com/FIIUgihzYh
— Aliza Rosen (@alizar) June 12, 2023
As of now, the app is finally out of beta and ready to be used by the public.
The startup also announced that it managed to raise $3.96 million during the seed funding, with some of the largest investors being Khosla Ventures, Accel, Snap, and Pinterest, among others.
Commenting on the app, Rosen said that she was inspired to build it as she was always interested in planning trips.
I just loved the process of thinking about new places to go — whether that was a far-off destination or in the city that I lived in and the surrounding area. I’ve always just been super fascinated with discovering new places.
She added that finding places to visit that meet travelers’ needs and preferences can be quite difficult at times.
The internet is not always helpful; it is flooded with reviews, ratings, blog posts, recommendations, and more (some of which are fake).
The way we discover and share places is broken. The internet is overrun with reviews from strangers. We want recommendations we can trust, but sourcing and exchanging recommendations from our network requires a ton of manual work. I started Rex to fix this. (2/7)
— Aliza Rosen (@alizar) June 12, 2023
Strangers write these, and travelers don’t know their tastes, preferences, and alike, so two people can have a vastly different experiences by visiting the same place.
This is what led developers to build Rex — an app used by friends and family whose taste in travel users do know.
Rex is free for download on the App Store. For the moment, it does not feature ads, subscriptions, or in-app purchases.