[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Fresco (YC F24) - AI Copilot for Construc...
___________________________________________________________________
Launch HN: Fresco (YC F24) - AI Copilot for Construction
Superintendents
Hi HN! We're Arvind and Akhil, and we're building Fresco
(https://fresco-ai.com/). We use AI to quickly create and manage
documentation for construction superintendents. Here's a demo
video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKIQQKkjv_4.
Superintendents are the busiest and most expensive people on
construction sites. Just like doctors in a hospital, supers
diagnose and triage issues, make observations about conditions, and
delegate action items to their team. Also, like doctors, supers are
responsible for an enormous amount of document generation,
accounting for the work done in the field so that back office
people can keep records for billing purposes. Right now, supers
are taking 30-200 photos per day to document site progress (mostly
for liability reasons, or in case of a dispute with the owner over
delays and deliverables). At the end of the day, they'll spend a
few hours uploading those photos into OneDrive, or project
management software like Procore or ACC. They might transcribe
those photos; few supers have time to do this thoroughly, so these
photos aren't very searchable. And supers might use those photos to
create "daily logs", which are structured documents that account
for the work done on site on any given day. Fresco uses generative
AI to compile reports and punch lists for superintendents _during_
their site walks, not after. Supers simply take short videos with
voiceover, or upload photos, and Fresco does the rest, creating
notes with transcription, photos, assignees, and due dates. Supers
can easily text their crew action items, and receive texts back to
keep informed of when tasks are done. We also route this to
whatever project management software they 're using with a single
click. Right now, we charge per site per month, which includes
unlimited users on any given construction project. The typical
price is $1k/month, but we offer discounts for multi-month or
multi-site commitments. If you want to try Fresco yourself, you can
sign up for demo access at fresco-ai.com. We've also gotten some
interest from other verticals where site walks are common, like
commercial real estate. We're hoping that in the future it may be
possible to address these as well. If you've worked in the
construction field, we'd love to hear your experiences and
insights. We look forward to your comments and feedback!
Author : arvindveluvali
Score : 59 points
Date : 2024-11-21 15:03 UTC (7 hours ago)
| rm_-rf_slash wrote:
| Looks neat! I don't work in construction but I know folks in
| civil engineering. Are there applicabilities with Fresco you
| could see in that domain?
| arvindveluvali wrote:
| Absolutely. There are a ton of industries where people conduct
| physical site inspections and turn those into structured
| documents; as in construction, those take a long time to make!
| We've actually had some inbound from civil engineers, and if we
| can be useful to folks in your network, we'd love to connect
| with them.
| justinzhou13 wrote:
| This is super cool and there's a ton of other industries where
| this is sorely needed!
| StephenSmith wrote:
| We make an AI camera for residential home builders. I'd love to
| chat to see if there's any synergy here.
|
| bedrockwireless.com
|
| Ping me, stephen [at] bedrockwireless.com
| kyleli626 wrote:
| really cool application of LLMs to a big problem - nice work.
| Closi wrote:
| FYI - this could be really useful in logistics operations and
| production too! (Which is my background, although I suspect the
| price point is unfortunately much too high for that application).
| arvindveluvali wrote:
| Thanks for the flag! Absolutely, there are many verticals where
| we think Fresco can be useful. Would love to hear your thoughts
| on price point.
| bambax wrote:
| With all due respect and while wishing you best of luck, it's
| always a bit worrisome when generative AI is used in the real
| world with real consequences...
|
| In my experience, what LLMs, even some of the most advanced ones
| (o1, Gemini 1.5) are really good at is rationalization after the
| fact: explaining why they were right, even when presented with
| direct evidence to the contrary.
|
| I just ran an experiment trying to get various models put
| footnote references in the OCR of a text, based on the content of
| the footnotes. I tested 120+ different models via OpenRouter;
| they all failed, but the "best" ones failed in a very bizarre and
| I think, dangerous way: they made up some text to better fit the
| footnote references! And then they lied about it, saying in a
| "summary" paragraph that no text had been changed, and/or that
| they had indeed been able to place all references.
|
| So I guess my question is: how do you detect and flag
| hallucinations?
| hehehheh wrote:
| It has to be the same as all AI: you need someone thorough to
| check what it did.
|
| LLM generated code needs to be read line by line. It is still
| useful to do that with code because reading is faster than
| googling then typing.
|
| You can't detect hallucinations in general.
| bambax wrote:
| A (costly) way is to compare responses from different models,
| as they don't hallucinate in exactly the same way.
| arvindveluvali wrote:
| This is a really good point, but we don't think hallucinations
| pose a significant risk to us. You can think of Fresco like a
| really good scribe; we're not generating new information, just
| consolidating the information that the superintendent has
| already verbally flagged as important.
| mayank wrote:
| This seems odd. If your scribe can lie in complex and
| sometimes hard to detect ways, how do you not see some form
| of risk? What happens when (not if) your scribe misses
| something and real world damages ensue as a result? Are you
| expecting your users to cross check every report? And if so,
| what's the benefit of your product?
| arvindveluvali wrote:
| We rely on multimodal input: the voiceover from the
| superintendent, as well as the video input. The two
| essentially cross check one another, so we think the
| likelihood of lies or hallucinations is incredibly low.
|
| Superintendents usually still check and, if needed,
| edit/enrich Fresco's notes. Editing is way faster/easier
| than generating notes net new, so even in the extreme
| scenario where a supe needs to edit every single note,
| they're still saving ~90% of the time it'd otherwise have
| taken to generate those notes and compile them into the
| right format.
| ylow wrote:
| Even just audio transcription can hallucinate in bizarre
| ways. https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/10/hospitals-adopt-
| error-pro...
| joe_the_user wrote:
| "Concerns about medical note-taking tool raised after
| researcher discovers it invents things no one said..."
|
| https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-
| intell...
| lolinder wrote:
| This is the wrong response. It doesn't matter whether you've
| asked it to summarize or to produce new information,
| hallucinations are always a question of when, not if. LLMs
| don't have a "summarize mode", their mode of operation is
| always the same.
|
| A better response would have been "we run all responses
| through a second agent who validates that no content was
| added that wasn't in the original source". To say that you
| simply don't believe hallucinations apply to you tells me
| that you haven't spent enough time with this technology to be
| selling something to safety-critical industries.
| fakedang wrote:
| Honestly this is a very nitpicky argument. The issue for site
| contractors is not with manually checking each entry to ensure
| it's correct or not. It's writing the stuff down in the first
| place.
|
| I'm exploring a similar but unrelated use case for generative
| AI, and in discovery interviews, what I learnt was that site
| contractors and engineers do not request or expect 100%
| accuracy, and leave adequate room for doubt. For them, it's the
| hours and hours of manually writing down a TON of paperwork,
| which in some industries is often months and months of work
| written by some of the poorest communicators on the planet.
| Because these tasks end up consuming so much time, they forgo
| the correct methodology and some even tend to fill up some
| reports with random bullshit just so that the project moves
| forward - in most cases, this writing work is done for
| liability concerns as mentioned above, rather than for the
| purposes of someone actually going through it. If the writing
| part is cleared for many of these guys, most wouldn't have a
| problem with the reading and correcting part.
| arvindveluvali wrote:
| Totally agree! That's what we've observed, as well.
| bambax wrote:
| It's unclear how filling reports with "random bullshit" will
| protect anyone from liability... It seems you're saying that
| the current situation is so bad that anything different would
| be an improvement, and less-random bs is better than outright
| bs.
|
| I'm sorry if my comment came across as nitpicky; it's just
| that every time I try to do some actual work with LLMs
| (that's not pure creativity, where hallucination is a
| feature) it never follows prompts exactly, and goes fast off
| the rails. In the context of construction work, that sounded
| dangerous. But happy to be proved wrong.
| erispoe wrote:
| The process you described is very far from how companies who
| productize LLMs use them.
| neither_color wrote:
| This is a good idea but I hope you've got some secret training
| data that isn't available on the open web. I've been able to
| stump ChatGPT with simple "gotcha" national electrical code
| questions that a foreman wouldn't have a problem answering(e.g
| sizing a breaker for a heater depending on different situations).
| There are far fewer subreddits and forums dedicated to trade
| specialists and as a community they're more hostile to DIY-ers
| and will tell you "get someone licensed." They're also not the
| types to write detailed reports and case studies on what they
| did.
|
| It's not that trades are super complicated in comparison to other
| fields like web development, it's that there's no GitHub, no
| source shared among all pros like "here's what I did and how I
| got it to work." Without a good stack overflow how does the AI
| judge the quality of workmanship in photos?
|
| You are absolutely right, btw, about google drives and one drives
| and hundreds of photos and all that. My experience is in dealing
| with general contractors on smaller jobs, not supers on mega
| projects, but they have similar issues. Lots of sloppy back and
| forths and poor tracking of change orders, etc,
|
| What Im trying to say, since I sort of rambled there, is that
| while processing and sorting and making punchlists is a good
| idea, I have doubts about AI's current ability to accurately spot
| code(as in building code, which unlike JavaScript varies by zip
| code) issues. Does the AI know that you dont have enough
| clearance at X or does that have to go into the recording?
| arvindveluvali wrote:
| Great point! We're really relying on the superintendent's
| expertise, transcribing/compiling what they're saying rather
| than flagging code violations or other notables ourselves. We
| think analysis should be (for now, at least) the job of the
| highly trained and experienced superintendent, and our job is
| to take care of the transcription and admin that isn't really a
| good use of their time.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| I'm in the middle of a renovation project (not as a professional
| developer, just a random dipshit who wanted to make a multifam
| building a little nicer and bit off way too much)
|
| Anyway, I've been running around compiling and recompiling photos
| and punchlists, and my reaction was "Coool!"
|
| I'm not your target audience but I have to imagine the people
| that are would get utility out of this.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-11-21 23:00 UTC)