Decision fatigue. If you binge watch, you know it well. Netflix navigation can be a daunting task: the on-demand content platform has thousands of movie and TV show episodes. Sure, Netflix has a “Recommendations” feature to suggest content based on your viewing history, but an algorithm doesn’t always cut it.
Enter Sense -- a live “Netflix Assistant” that is based on AI, Netflix, and on-demand culture. Essentially, the user texts live Netflix concierges that use their expert knowledge of what is available on Netflix to give you a personalized, human recommendation on what to watch.
“The main point is that it was extremely hard for me to find movies on Netflix that I really enjoyed,” said co-founder and CEO Jake Cohn to iDigitalTimes about what inspired the creation of Sense. “I began talking to people about it and reading online, and you start to see that there are a lot of people who feel the same way.”
To use, simply send a text to 213-297-3673 asking for a recommendation. The concierges text you back and ask for your name and Twitter handle (the latter is optional). After that, they ask you for a movie you like and a few reasons why you like it. You text back and forth a bit, and then they give you a recommendation (or two!) of what you should watch.
“With us, you don’t have to do the work -- you don’t have to go online or look through anything,” said Cohn. “You just text us with real human language, just as you would a friend, and from there we understand what you’re looking for and give you a movie based on that.”
What makes this unique is that there is a real person the user is interacting with.
“We strongly believe that there needs to be human input,” said Cohn. “Currently we have contractors -- they’re going through and talking to every single person that texts.”
Since there is a real person on the other end, the selection process can be tailored to each person. Receive a recommendation you’ve already seen? Just let them know. Not too pleased with what you watched? Give feedback via text when Sense follows up through four replies: “spot on,” “pretty good,” “squash,” or “haven’t seen it yet.”
Sense asks users for their Twitter handle because the company is working on offering recommendations by scanning a user’s Twitter to get insight into their personality. This feature, which is not mandatory, will provide another element of personalization in content recommendation.
“We do curation based on how you tweet and what you tweet about,” said Cohn. “We’re just getting started with at. Right now, it’s very human powered. We’ll just have someone browse through someone’s Twitter account. You can start to understand people’s personality better and figure out what they may respond to in movies. In the future, we’re going to try to have a machine learning system so we can be efficient with it.
Sense primarily focuses on movie recommendations because television content produces itsown challenges.
“We can make a TV recommendation -- we have a pretty good handle on that,” said Cohn. “But what we say is it won’t necessarily be as spot on. We haven’t studied TV shows as movies. With TV shows, the pilot of a show doesn’t necessarily capture you a hundred percent but what happens is, in shows like Breaking Bad , when you get involved you get hooked.”
Earlier this year, Netflix announced it would be available around the world in every country excluding China, Syria, North Korea and Crimea.
“With this launch, consumers around the world -- from Singapore to St. Petersburg, from San Francisco to Sao Paulo -- will be able to enjoy TV shows and movies simultaneously -- no more waiting,” said Netflix co-founder and Chief Executive Reed Hastings at CES 2016 in Las Vegas. “With the help of the Internet, we are putting power in consumers’ hands to watch whenever, wherever and on whatever device.”
Right now, Sense is focusing on U.S. Netflix users with the goal to “expand overseas as soon as possible.” Part of the obstacle is the variation of the Netflix library from country to country. Occasionally; however, it will make the exception for international users.
“Sometimes people reach out to us over Twitter and we are actually able to give them picks through that medium,” said Cohn. “I can’t guarantee that would stay for the long term but currently if you text and you’re overseas, we won’t shut you out. Anyone who reaches out on Twitter, we’re going to respond to them. We’ve had a lot of good response from people from Brazil and India, and they get close to the same experience.”
So far, said Cohn, the feedback is positive and thus far, after 15,000 to 20,000 responses, 33 percent of users return unprompted.
“We’re hearing from people unprompted that they love it,” said Cohn. “We’re also finding that there are really great movies for certain people on Netflix but they never know about it. One example I like to give is a huge Back to the Future fan and he had no clue there was a documentary about the making of the Back to the Future movies on Netflix.”
To that end, the idea behind Sense is not to give obvious recommendations like sequels.
“We have designed our picks so that we don’t give you the most obvious choices,” said Cohn. “We really thought out the experience here for people. We don’t want to waste their time. If they say, “I Kill Bill for the action and violence,” we’re not going to come back and say, “You should watch Kill Bill 2 or Django Unchained. We figure the odds are pretty high that you’ve seen Tarantino’s movie before.”
Fans of other on-demand platforms, like Hulu and Amazon Video, need not worry, as Sense plans to expand in the future.
“In time, we will want to reach people who have other subscriptions,” said Cohn. “The goal isn’t to stay into movie. We are going to take our time with movies since recommendations are extremely tough. In the long term, we want to expand this to different forms of media like books and songs.”
