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Lioness AI Sex Toy Can Teach You About Your Orgasms

Navin Bondade 0 Comments Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Deep Learning, Machine Learning

Lioness AI has been pioneering sex tech since 2017, but CES 2020 was the first time the company was allowed to exhibit its AI-enabled sex toy at one of the world’s biggest tech shows.

After rethinking on its earlier policies, the Consumer Technology Association allows the sex-positive sex tech companies to display their work at CES, which took place earlier this month in Las Vegas.

Here in this giant marketplace of technology, the San Francisco company Lioness.io has also participated with their Lioness Generation 2 AI sex toy which eventually becomes one of the top ten finalists for an award at CES.

Liz Klinger the co-founder and CEO of Lioness said our company made a splash on the internet in 2017 for creating the first vibrator that uses patented biofeedback technology to help you improve your sex life.

The company is launching Lioness Generation 2 in mid-2020 with AI-assisted guidance, based on years of working with Lioness customers. It analyzes data on more than 30,000 orgasms and numerous user studies.

The Lioness Generation 1 was launched back in 2017 and it uses precision sensors with the biofeedback features to show your arousal and orgasm on an intuitive and interactive mobile app.

The Lioness’s high-precision precision sensor suite brings technology that previously existed only in research labs into user hands in the form of a sleek, easy-to-use vibrator, with the privacy of their own home.

The tuned algorithms and AI-based system was trained on over 6 years of quantitative and qualitative data from study volunteers, and over 30,000+ anonymized sessions to provide never-before-available guidance.

It comes with an intuitive app experience by engineers and designers from Google and Amazon Lab126.

The Lioness.io is founded by ex-GoogleX and Amazon technologists and developed from more than four years of research and development with sex researchers and doctors worldwide.

A spoke person form VentureBeat spoke with Klinger, who started the company with Anna Lee and James Wang, who put a lot of research and development into the project.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

Can you tell me about the background behind Lioness?

Liz Klinger: Our first product, the Lioness vibrator, uses biofeedback and precision sensors, so you can literally see your own arousal and orgasm. You use Lioness like a normal vibrator, and then when you have a session where you want to see what happened, you can go to the app and look at data about yourself.

This is showing force overtime pelvic floor muscle contractions, vaginal contractions. You’re able to add different tags and notes about the experience. Some folks track whether they’ve been stressed, whether they’ve used this with a partner, whether they’ve used alcohol or cannabis or CBD, all sorts of different things.

Where are the sensors located? Are they all over the device?

Klinger: The two main sensors are–you see these little knobs here. These are force sensors, detecting how much you squeeze or not. There are other sensors in there to balance out–for example, there’s a gyro inside.

You’re going to be doing different movements, to balance out whether this is at an angle & other things. There’s also a temperature sensor, to automatically start recording a session, & changes in body temperature.

We’re trying to find a way to avoid having too many buttons, to make it automated and seamless. When you’re using the vibrator, it’s just a vibrator experience.

Is this the first product so far for the company, or have you done other stuff?

Klinger: This is our first product, our baby. At CES this year we’re rolling out the AI guidance. We launched back in 2017, and over time we’ve been able to analyze more than 30,000 anonymized sessions.

We put together an algorithm that’s able to show these hot spots, where people have higher arousal and more likelihood of orgasm. It’s this very regular motion from the pelvic floor, about one to two hertz, very rapid succession. We’re also able to show–okay, you’re kind of close here, or in other areas.

That’s particularly useful for people who–a lot of women have questions about, was that an orgasm? Some people have questions like, “I’ve never had an orgasm before. Am I getting closer or not?”

Some people want to better understand their own experience. What makes for a better experience for me?

Anna Lee (left), Liz Klinger, and James

Above: Anna Lee (left), Liz Klinger, and James Wang are the founders of Lioness.

Did you have to run something like a clinical study for this?

Klinger: That’s actually one of the next things that we’re working on. One of the challenges that we had launching the product was that the more we were setting things up and trying to figure out okay, what sort of information can we offer to people at this point? What’s already available in the research?

There’s barely any physiological research on the function of arousal and orgasm, particularly for women and people with vaginas. It’s unfortunate. A lot of the cutting-edge research was from the 1980s. It’s still useful.

There are basic building blocks. It’s how we were able to show this is what an orgasm generally is.

One interesting example, with erectile dysfunction for men, you have things like Viagra and Cialis. One of the big things with the blue pill, when that launched out into the market, not only were more men going to the doctor to ask for it, but the doctors knew that when they came in to ask for it.

There might not be a problem with the genitals. There might be overall blood flow issues, heart attack risk.

For women, there’s no analog to that, even though heart attacks are the leading cause of death for women. In part because there’s just been a lack of research and focus in that area. There’s been this jump over that phase of research and understanding for women, even though it’s kind of a big deal.

And now you can collect an amount of data that no one ever had access to before.

Klinger: Exactly. And even though a lot of the research on female sexual function today–a lot of it is collected via survey data. There’s FSFI, the Female Sexual Function Index, a survey that you fill out.

A lot of different drug companies use it. It’s one piece of the puzzle, but it’s not necessarily–it’s a lot less robust if you just have that compared to having both that and the physiological data.

So product improvement is one reason, but there are also research purposes for collecting these analytics.

Klinger: We’re starting to do some of that. Some of the stuff I did over the last two years 1 was a case study that I presented to a rehabilitation nursing conference on the case of a person who’d had a concussion.

She happened to have a Lioness, and she saw an overnight change in her orgasm. It basically flatlined. She also had a lot of head pressure and headaches, so it was very much a struggle.

The realization that it wasn’t–she thought the vibrator was broken, which is how we learned about it. But the realization that there was something wrong with her got her to take her injuries more seriously.

She’s a derby player. She wanted to get back into the sport and push people around and all that. But this led her to realize that she really needed to take care of herself.

We’ve also done more fun projects. There’s a data project we did with Eaze, the cannabis company, where we got a couple of Lioness users, volunteers, people who already had Lioness, and we worked with Eaze to have them try different products, cannabis and CBD products, and compare the effects of those products.

It’s been interesting. There’s a huge landscape of all these different questions and possibilities out there about how pleasure plays a role in all these different parts of our lives. I’m excited to explore it all.

There’s a bunch of sex tech companies at CES this year, finally. Do you feel like you’re doing something different, taking a different route from the others?

Klinger: For us, it’s always been more about the biofeedback and the data and insights we’re able to offer people with our technology. That’s the thing that our customers are really looking for. A lot of these sensors in here are–it’s just recently, in the last couple of years, that the costs have started to go down.

Another aspect of it is we have Anna, my co-founder on the team. She used to work at Amazon Lab126 as a mechanical engineer. She knows her way around sensors and everything. She’s a specialized person in the space. James, my other co-founder, he’s a data scientist.

He used to work at Google and Bridgewater Associates. He knows his way around data, privacy, all those aspects of the product. You need a lot of different specialties to do this. There are also different barriers to entry for things like fundraising, advertising, all the things that sex tech companies have to deal with.

It seems like we have a positive outcome now. I don’t know how painful it was behind the scenes, but–

Klinger: Now, yeah. It’s nice now, for sure. It’s interesting. I’ve also seen companies that have come up and died because–to be frank, CES and these other large organizations, they’re the gatekeepers that determine what’s hot or not in technology, setting the trends and the tone for the coming year.

By not having all these different sex tech companies, with a few exceptions here, we’re being overlooked as a category, even though it’s a category that, like everything else, people buy and use in their daily lives.

It’s still useful. It’s how we were able to show–this is what an orgasm generally is, the general definition of it. One interesting example, with erectile dysfunction for men, you have things like Viagra and Cialis.

One of the big things with the blue pill, when that launched out into the market, not only were more men going to the doctor to ask for it, but the doctors knew that when they came in to ask for it, there might not just be a problem with the genitals. There might be overall blood flow issues, other things to screen for.

VentureBeat: And now you can collect an amount of data that no one ever had access to before.

VentureBeat: So product improvement is one reason, but there are also research purposes for collecting these analytics.

Klinger: Right. We’re starting to do some of that. Some of the stuff I did over the last two years–one was a case study that I presented to a rehabilitation nursing conference last year, on the case of a person who’d had a concussion.

She happened to have a Lioness, and she saw an overnight change in her orgasm. It basically flatlined. She also had a lot of head pressure and headaches, so it was very much a struggle.

She’s a derby player. She wanted to get back into the sport and push people around and all that. But this led her to realize that she really needed to take care of herself.

We’ve also done more fun projects. There’s a data project we did with Eaze, the cannabis company, where we got a couple of Lioness users, volunteers, people who already had Lioness, and we worked with Eaze to have them try different products, cannabis, and CBD products, and compare the effects of those products on their overall experience.