Can AI—and a Personal Assistant—Cure Burnout for Working Moms?

Plus: Nest's original vision, a vaccine-weary public, and catastrophic business as usual.
Yoky Matsuoka
When the pandemic first hit, Yoky Matsuoka, a working mother and founder of the assistant service Yohana, thought she’d at least be spending more time with her son. Courtesy of Yohana

Hey, folks, did you miss me? One subscriber didn’t; he sent an email suggesting I not return because Lauren Goode was such a terrific replacement. Uh, thanks, Lauren.

The Plain View

Yoky Matsuoka thought that working at home during Covid would be a blessing. For the past 15 years, the mother of four kids has been anything but stay-at-home. In 2007, as a professor at the University of Washington working on AI, robotics, and neuroscience, she received a MacArthur fellowship—the so-called genius award—and began a journey in corporate America that included cofounding Google X, becoming the first CTO of Nest, and heading the health initiative at Apple. In 2015, she was about to take on an executive post at Twitter when she was diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. After treatments, she dove back into the fray, beginning a startup called Yo Labs.

As bad as the beginning of the pandemic was, she thought she’d at least be spending more time with her family. But as with many others, working at home proved stressful—the work was always there. After a day of Zoom meetings, she had to address all the family mini-crises that had piled up. There was less time to deal with the stuff of everyday existence, like making cable appointments or cleaning out the garage. Research shows that this is a common experience—a recent study found burnout in 97 percent of US mothers between the ages of 24 and 39.

That insight shaped the direction of the product she’d been working on—a blend of human and artificial intelligence that promises to clear out all that domestic detritus in order to improve the health and well-being of its users. The result is a service called Yohana, based on the Japanese word for flowers, and it assigns a living and breathing assistant to working mothers like Matsuoka. (Eventually, she says, the service will be available for other people as well.) The assistants draw on data and AI to tackle the to-do lists of subscribers, who they interact with on a first-name basis. Matsuoka speaks reverently of her assistant, Maggie.

And the whole project is funded by … Panasonic?

The last Panasonic product I owned was a VHS tape machine. But it turns out that, of late, the company has been revitalized by a profitable relationship with Tesla. Matsuoka says that she’s inspired by Panasonic’s founding mission based on well-being and happiness. Yes, every company has an inspiring vision. But when you see Matsuoka’s long-term goals, the move makes sense.

Yohana assigns a living and breathing assistant to working mothers.

Courtesy of Yohana

Here’s the way Yohana works. For $149 a month, subscribers get access to an actual human being working as kind of a personal factotum, relentlessly checking off the joyless tasks (and even some joyful ones) that either eat up hours of the day or don’t get done at all. Matsuoka is sensitive to the charge of elitism—while Yohana is designed for upper-middle-class moms who make around $150,000, the service breaks down to only five dollars a day. And really rich people, she says, already have their own full-time assistants. While Matsuoka won’t reveal salaries of Yohana assistants, she notes that the typical annual income of a personal assistant in Seattle, where the service will first roll out, is around $65,000. The first group of assistants at Yohana will be full-timers, with an eventual mix of employees and part-time contractors.

The subscription fee is a loss-leader for what will become a thriving ecosystem of services. Think of it as an Amazon marketplace, only with services instead of products. “We’re building our own network of pros, the kind of people who get five stars on Yelp,” she says. “We see ourselves as a one-stop shop.” So the Maggies of Yohana (it’s also the new name for Yo Labs) will be able to tap a network of plumbers, electricians, and florists—who will kick back a percentage of the fees to the company.

But the real innovation in Yohana will come from its integration of AI into the process, and even creating new devices to make that happen. Matsuoka’s wheelhouse is automation, robotics, and data analysis. “I absolutely believe that we have to start to incorporate hardware in the right way, and we're already starting to work on some of those things,” she says. “Just as I did with Nest, we’ll be using the sensor data as the eyes and ears in people's homes to really predict what's going to happen.” She shares an anecdote from Nest where the motion detector in the thermostat detected that the grandfather of a fellow executive was getting up at night much more frequently—an early warning of a serious medical condition. Yohana hopes, with user approval, to ratchet up that process so that its human assistants can make appointments with auto shops, chimney cleaners, and maybe even doctors to address conditions before they wind up on the subscriber’s to-do list.

Matsuoka is aware of the privacy implications, and vows that personal information will reside in a secure digital preserve that she calls “The Vault.” (One assumes that a valid subpoena will give authorities access to the content.) “They don't have to give us any personal information,” she says. The bet is that, as subscribers learn to trust the service, they will see value in sharing information.

Panasonic may not be the first company one thinks of when it comes to AI. But it is associated with the century-old revolution that freed women from hours of household drudgery by providing machines to ease their household labors. By hiring Matsuoka and funding Yohana, it now hopes to hitch itself to a second revolution, where a personal assistant, an affiliate network of service providers, and an AI-powered ecosystem of hardware and data analysis automate even more domestic tasks. We’re all cool with washing machines, but the tradeoffs in this second iteration are as yet unknown. Will a mass market network of human assistants create a disturbing upstairs-downstairs ethos? Is something lost when it’s an assistant, and not the intended person, signing the card or choosing a birthday or wedding gift? Will we be comfortable with an AI scanning our home, our automobile, and our mobile devices to learn enough about us to proactively knock off our chores? Matsuoka thinks that, if done carefully, the answer is yes. Oh, and by the way, the gifts chosen by her assistant, she says, are better than the ones she would pick.

It’s not the thought, but the subscription, that counts.

Time Travel

Ten years ago, I wrote the first story about Nest, the Silicon Valley company founded by Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers, whose goal to change our households began with a reinvention of the thermostat. CTO Yoky Matsuoka’s personal mission was firmly set even then:

Included among Nest’s advisors is Stanford AI head and Google researcher Sebastian Thrun, who told Fadell and Rogers that the best person in the world to produce this complicated intelligence was Yoky Matsuoka, a 2007 MacArthur “genius” fellow and MIT-trained computer scientist who heads a University of Washington lab, and also was working on futuristic projects for the top-secret Google X division. Rogers set up a meeting.

When Matsuoka heard him utter the acronym HVAC, she pictured some guy in a blue shirt coming to her house and checking out some dirty spot in the basement to fix something. “But seven minutes later, I was captivated,” she says. “I’d seen plenty of smart home projects in academia, beginning in the 1980s, but they just could not take off. When Matt presented the idea, I tried to poke holes in it, but he had answers for every problem I bought up. I realized that this could be the entry point—and that this was an opportunity I could not miss.”

It’s the intelligence within that makes the Nest Learning Thermostat unique. After it’s installed, users simply set temperatures that make them comfortable for a few days. Soon, the thermostat figures out what you want, and starts adjusting temperatures on its own, based on time of day and whether people are around.

Ask Me One Thing

Loren writes, “More and more virologists are stating (almost whispering) that, sooner or later, a Covid-19 variant will appear that is vaccine-resistant. If the geniuses at Pfizer, Moderna, et al do come up with a new vaccine to protect against the new variant—and I hope they do—how do we get a vaccine-weary public to take it?”

Hi, Loren. I’m worried about a doomsday variant too. In my opinion, the response to Covid, despite millions of deaths worldwide, has been way too little, too late. I am at a loss to understand why the United States and other wealthy countries haven’t funded dozens of vaccine factories around the world, as well as launching efforts to quickly inoculate every nation on Earth. And don’t get me started on testing. A more urgent response would cut down the odds that a vaccine-resistant variant, or a much deadlier one, might emerge.

I would suspect that if your scenario happens—a new and scarier variant appears, and scientists concoct a new vaccine—we’d probably get a new round of tension between anti-vaxxers and the rest of us. Sadly we will probably have to suffer even more long-haul disease, hospitalizations, and death before the vast majority of Americans protect themselves. (Me? I’d be masked up tightly and in line to get that new shot.) Meanwhile, instead of resigning ourselves to permanently dealing with Covid, we should be taking every possible step to forestall it. As I wrote a few weeks ago, humanity’s insufficient response to the pandemic—and the equally dire specter of climate change—raises questions about the long-term outlook of our species. Have a great day!

You can submit questions to mail@wired.com. Write ASK LEVY in the subject line.

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