Engineer releases AI software Ask Steve

Entrepreneur Rajat Paharia of Bella Vista recently launched startup Ask Steve, which allows users to access the power of generative artificial intelligence (AI) on websites.

Paharia moved from Fremont, Calif., to Bella Vista last year. Over the past eight years, he worked at Google in augmented reality, assistants, human resources technology and AI. More recently, he’s been a mentor in the Fuel and Bounds accelerators and a guest lecturer at the University of Arkansas.

Paharia came up with the company name and model about a year ago after reading a social media post that identified a graduate student as a good mental model for large language models, such as ChatGPT. The graduate student was named Steve.

While Paharia was Google’s product management lead for human resources technology, ChatGPT became popular. Paharia had ideas for improving the suite of tools he was responsible for, such as using AI to quickly create emails for recruiters, summarize an array of employee performance reviews for managers and produce letters from an outline about company benefits to send to employees.

He didn’t have the staff or ability to develop the ideas at Google, but he did after leaving the company earlier this year. Then, he created Ask Steve, a Google Chrome internet browser extension that allows users to add AI capabilities to any website … “versus having to go into ChatGPT in a separate browser window, do a bunch of stuff and come back,” he said.

The first version of Ask Steve is free. To make money, Paharia plans to create a premium version for business use. He’s been promoting Ask Steve so that “a significant portion of people are using this to make their lives better and faster every day,” he said.