What is Joggle?
The new AI company is set to launch its services at a special event in Douglas this week.
Siobhán Fletcher speaks to Managing Director Mike Alcock.
Manx Newscast
Manx Newscast: Meet the new AI company setting up base on the Island
Hi, my name is Mike Olcock. I'm managing director of Joggle. We're a brand new AI startup planning to open up on the Isle of Man. So I guess first of all, let's be simple at the very beginning here. What is Joggle then? So Joggle is a suite of small business AI assistants. So we're trying to simplify AI. It can be a difficult and complicated area. So we've come up with a product called Joggle that allows small business owners to leverage the power of AI without having to learn deep AI skills. It's a conversational interface. It's very easy to use. Anybody can use it. And it focuses on hopefully the things that small business owners struggle with. So it does social media. It creates content. It creates imagery. It creates videos. It creates legal documents. So all the things that can be quite time consuming and difficult for small businesses who want to focus on running a hotel or being a good plumber, Joggle is like your personal AI assistant. Perfect. So you mentioned complexity there and people being a bit scared of AI. It raises concerns often about accessibility and that sort of thing. So how does Joggle ensure that its tools are practical and kind of user friendly for those small business owners who may not have that experience on no necessarily what AI is? Yeah, that's a great question. So we try and simplify it. So Joggle has got a really simple conversational interface. You don't have to use a mouse. You don't have to use a keyboard. It runs on your phone perfectly happy. You literally have a chat with Joggle. Hey Joggle, create me a social media post. Joggle will say great idea Fred. Here's some suggestions for you. And you just click on the suggestion that you like and it will do that work for you. At the moment, it's done by typing in with your keyboard. But with all the advances in AI, the next version of Joggle will have a voice interface. You'll literally be able to talk to your phone and it'll start creating your social media, images, videos, whatever you need, legal documents. Your press release here mentions that Joggle will enhance productivity and efficiency for local businesses. Can you provide some kind of specific examples of where that's worked effectively, elsewhere, the case studies of where that we can see that? Yeah, so for example, social media, it's time consuming. You've got to create your own post. You've got to sit down and think about it and write them out yourself. We've been working with the Adelweiss Hotel on the Isle of Man. She's been using Joggle to create her social media post, the owner of the hotel. And it's literally saving her probably hours a week because the hours you might think of first of all coming up with ideas for social media posts, but then actually writing them out, Joggle can do it in about 30 seconds. It doesn't necessarily get it perfect. It's artificially intelligence, but surely can edit those posts with a couple of clicks and then hit the button. And it will automatically post them to all of our social media feeds. So again, she's not having to spend the time opening up an Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, and manually post each of those Joggle does it all automatically, so it's a real time saver. And you're hosting workshops to gather feedback from small businesses. Can you tell me more about the workshops themselves and what you're hoping to achieve? Yeah, so I've just come between two workshops as we speak, so we've just done our first workshop this morning to the hospitality sector. And what we're basically doing is reaching out to small business owners on the Isle of Man who are coming to the workshops to say, look, this is Joggle and this is what it does today. But what would you like it to do? What are your biggest headaches as a small business owner? What are the problems you would like AI to solve because we will build Joggle with your input to make it the most useful product that you'll ever have in your toolbox. So we're keen as well as launching Joggle as a product to the island, we're keen to get the feedback and the input from the Isle of Man business owners who can tell us what they'd like Joggle to do for them. And I guess AI adoption, we talked a bit earlier about the fears, but it often sparks fears about job displacement or the kind of unintended consequences. What measures are you taking to address those potential concerns within the local business community? Is that something that maybe they're coming to you in these workshops and mentioning as well? Yeah, the feedback we're guessing is that most, a lot of the small businesses, certainly the ones we saw this morning, they're aware of AI. They can see it coming. Some of them are a little bit frightened of it. A lot of them are thinking, this is the future, this is going to save me a lot of time and efforts and so on. And we're keen to build a product that works alongside small business owners. So we're not suggesting that Joggle will displace your marketing person, it will make your marketing person work more efficiently, more quickly and more cost effectively. You're still going to have the human element and Joggle doesn't take that away, it doesn't automate everything. When you create a post, Joggle can write a post, but it's not going to get it perfect and you've got the edit capability. And of course, coming up with the ideas, your marketing person can feed those into Joggle and make sure that it's got the right tone of voice and all of that sort of good stuff. So we're trying to work hand in hand with the people that you normally use. And you mentioned like you already have a business at least on the Isle of Manning, but you're trying to launch more widely here. So beyond this launch event and the workshops you're doing right now, what are your long term plans, I suppose, for establishing your presence here on the island? So, yeah, we plan to open an office, that's the plan at the moment, to have an office, we're not sure where Douglas is the obvious choice, but there's lots of other places that look very attractive. I'm personally house hunting, so I'm moving to the island, I'm managing director, so I'm going to be living on the island for the foreseeable future. So I'm looking forward to being part of the community, the welcome from everyone has been fantastic. Just from people generally, but also from government and business, they're all really encouraging us to come to the island because they want successful AI businesses to be part of the island. So, yeah, we're hoping to be an integrated part of the island community for a number of years to come. The beauty of the Isle of Manning for us is that we can use it as a sort of test bed for what we're doing, we can refine the product, get all the feedback from the local businesses, get the product to have absolutely perfect. We then intend to launch it globally, so this has got the potential to be a global product, we hope. So, you know, after the first three months on the island, we hope to go out to the UK market probably first and the US second, and then the world's are hopefully our oyster. Excuse me, Isle of Manning is the sort of base to start off then. So as that technology evolves, what commitments are you at Joggle making to transparency, particularly around data security and that sort of ethical use of AI? Yeah, so we've worked really hard on that. In fact, we produced a little podcast using Joggle, which can now create podcasts, which is really interesting on our GDPR policies and our data security. So Joggle is hosted, so it's currently a web application that will very shortly be an app for Android and Apple phones as well, but it's hosted using Google's services, so we're using industrial strength hosting and industrial strength data protection. We've got a full GDPR policy written by our CTO, so we want to be a good global citizen, we don't want to be risking people's data, and we've made the strongest efforts, we possibly could secure it. I suppose the other thing, if anyone's listening, a lot of these words, like you say, it kind of is the future, and equally they might be listening to AI and, you know, all the different things that we've talked about. So what's it like I suppose working in such a fast moving industry as well? I mean, you mentioned starting on the web, then it's going to be an app, then there's it's like constantly evolving, isn't it? It is constantly evolving. I think it's hugely exciting. I've been involved in Joggle now for just about six or seven months, and we had an image generator. You could type in, create me an image of people sat outside a pub on a Sunday day, and Joggle would create an image, and then you'd say, okay, well, maybe, you know, remove the dogs and put beard glasses on the table, and it was nice, but the results weren't very realistic. The faces didn't really look human, and so on, so you probably wouldn't want to use it in your promotional material. If you do that today, the results are almost photorealistic. Again, you may not choose to use them, but they are absolutely stunning, so the pace of change is quite incredible, and I think that's hugely exciting because, you know, AI is just going to get better and better. What we're doing with Joggle is trying to put guardrails around that, because AI can still make mistakes, and we're absolutely clear in our messaging that you don't trust it entirely. AI still makes mistakes, but we can actually train Joggle to avoid the typical mistakes that off-the-shelf platforms are making, so it's a little bit more secure and focused than a general purpose AI tool. Perfect, and the workshops, obviously, we'll mention in terms of when and where in the article, but if anyone's listening and they want to find out more about Joggle, where's the best place for them to go? Well, if you're on the island, I don't know when this is going out, but if you're on the island in the next few days, we'll have our launch on Wednesday tomorrow. That is the 27th, I think, 27th. Yeah, Wednesday at 5.30 at the Kiki Lounge in Douglas, just on the harbour, that's a free event, come along, too, so we're officially launching the products at that event. We realise people obviously won't necessarily be able to make that, so they can go to www.joggle.ai, that's our website, and everything that you need to find out about Joggle is on that website. We also have a special Isle of Man promotion at the moment, so as we launch the products and we're hoping to get our early adopters on board on the Isle of Man, we have a special discount code. It's IOM 2024, so if you sign up for Joggle from the website, type in the code IOM 2024, the code is valid until the end of December, and that gives you a 50% discount off your first year of Joggle. So that's a really valuable code, and it makes the monthly price of Joggle £6 a month, which we think is pretty reasonable for an AI tool that will automate your social media, your image creation, your videos, your legal documents and lots of other stuff for the price of a cup of coffee a month. Perfect, and is there anything else you think I've missed at all that you want to cover? No, I think just to say that I love the Isle of Man, I'm moving here, the warm welcome from everybody has been fantastic, we're really excited as a team to base ourselves here, and we're looking forward to a long and happy partnership with the people of the Isle of Man. Perfect, well good luck with it. Thank you. Thank you for making it to the end of the Manx Radio newscast, you are obviously someone with exquisite taste. May I politely suggest you might want to subscribe to this and a wide range of Manx Radio podcasts at your favourite podcast provider, so our best bits will magically appear on your smartphone. Thank you. [Music] (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]