With Dazzle, Marissa Mayer bets your camera roll has more info on your life than your inbox
When former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer told me earlier this month that she was finally ready to unveil Dazzle, the personal AI assistant thatraised an $8 million seed round last December, I couldn’t help but wonder if she’s playing copycat to Meta’s Muse, Instinct, and the wave of similar tools that have flooded the market over the past month. But when Mayer finally gave me a demo, Dazzle proved it’s taking a different approach. Instead of building context about you from text-heavy apps like email, calendars, and shopping histories, Dazzle’s AI assistant gets all its context from a single source: your camera roll. “I think that photos are an underappreciated source of information,” Mayer said. “You’ll be surprised what we can learn about you and how good a job we can do with your photos.” Mayer argues that if a photo is worth a thousand words, your camera roll is worth millions. By analyzing all the photos stored on your phone, Dazzle claims to understand your hobbies, interests, food, and style preferences, how you like to spend their time, and with whom. “We understand whether or not you like to ski, where your most recent trip was, what types of things your kids are into,” Mayer said. It’s no surprise that Mayer has built an assistant centered around photos. Her previous startup, Sunshine, launched an AI-powered photo-sharing tool calledShinein 2024. While that product was widely criticized for its outdated design, failed to attract widespread usage, and eventuallyshut down, Mayer says it nevertheless built “interesting IP.” I was eager to try Dazzle, which users can interact with through its app or via text. Dazzle splits its functionality into two core experiences. For immediate tasks, it can scan recent photos to pull details — like populating your calendar from an event flyer, or finding a repair person after spotting a broken garage door in your camera roll. Second, it mines your photo library to come up with personalized ideas for everything from holiday vacations to birthday gifts. Given that plenty of tools can parse pictures — like looking up where to buy a product, or searching information on an interesting art piece — I was far more curious to test what Dazzle could learn from my photo history. For instance, Mayer uses Dazzle to brainstorm family outings. By scanning her photos, she says, the assistant deduced that her family loves escape rooms, and subsequently suggested multiple San Francisco Bay Area locations she’d never heard of. When I tested Dazzle with a request for vacation recommendations, it suggested several Mediterranean spots, likely picking up on my past trips to Spain and Greece. But it also threw in Sicily, which surprised me since I was there four years ago. After some more tinkering, I noticed it has blind spots — it failed to remember my daughter already knows how to roller-skate when I asked if I should buy her a pair for her next birthday. Despite the hiccups, though, I appreciated Dazzle’s ideas for activities, like suggesting a local pottery studio, or a bioluminescent kayak tour in Tomales Bay. I’m sure the product will improve with time, and while I’m undecided on whether I’ll keep using it, I like that its suggestions feel more personal than what you’d get from an AI assistant that only knows your calendar and email. In the meantime, Mayer contends that given security concerns with products like Instinct and Muse, users may feel more comfortable handing over their photo libraries to an AI instead of granting it access to sensitive data like emails and messages. She emphasized that Dazzle prioritizes privacy, and discards any personal information the AI flags as sensitive. This flurry of new AI assistants is an exciting time for consumers. And while Dazzle isn’t as broadly useful as other offerings quite yet, it offers a glimpse of a future in which AI can do more than just execute tasks; it actually knows who you are.
