AI Research

This Company Uses Robots and AI to Create ‘Handwritten’ Notes

Published

2 months ago

July 4, 2025

Julia Herbst

Writing thank you notes might be one job plenty of people would be willing to let AI and robots take over.

Turns out, they already are.

The company Handwrytten deploys artificial intelligence to help customers whip up notes and then uses an army of robot scribes, gripping ballpoint pens, to write them.

“The vast, vast, vast majority of the time, you’d never have an idea that it’s written by a machine,” David Wachs, founder and CEO of the Tempe, Arizona, company, told Business Insider.

After all, we’re in a moment in which tech boosters say our digital counterparts will soon free us from work, scrub clean our to-do lists, and wade deeper into our personal lives.

Using technology to recreate the intimacy of a handwritten note also raises questions about authenticity, etiquette, and breaking through the everyday onslaught of emails, DMs, and text messages.

“Everybody’s getting so much electronic communication. What really stands out as old-fashioned communication,” Wachs said.

He founded Handwrytten in 2014 after leaving a text-messaging startup he’d launched a decade earlier. As he was departing that company, he wanted an easier way to send the handwritten goodbye notes he was drafting for employees and key clients because they would carry more weight than a digital message.

Avoiding the ‘uncanny valley’

In order to make sure the letters don’t look too perfect, Wachs said the robots vary letter shapes, line spacing, the left margin, and the strokes that join letters together.

Handwrytten tries to make its letters look good, but not too perfect.

Courtesy Handwrytten

“We do all this stuff to try to create the most accurate human writing, without falling into that uncanny valley,” Wachs said.

Using robots that can write in nearly three dozen styles of penmanship — some of which carry alliterative names like Enthusiastic Erin and Slanty Steve — the company sends about 20,000 cards a day to customers or, more often, directly to the recipient.

Most of Handwrytten’s customers are businesses, though about 20% to 30% are individual consumers, Wachs said. Clients include companies hoping to engage with customers, recruiters looking to soften up executive prospects, and nonprofits that want to stay close to donors. Sales grew about 30% in 2024, Wachs said.

In recent years, the company gave users the option of having AI write all or part of the messages.

“Our slogan has always been ‘Your words in pen and ink,’ but half the time now it’s not your words, it’s ChatGPT,” he said.

David Wachs is the founder and CEO of Handwrytten.

Courtesy Handwrytten

What matters, Wachs said, is that the resulting note looks real to the recipient. He said that many people assume custom digital messages like emails and texts have been written with AI, which, Wachs said, then discounts their effectiveness.

Does it count?

As a tactile throwback, a letter written by a robot is real enough for many Handwrytten customers, Wachs said.

While the intent of a letter meant to look handwritten might be genuine, Lizzie Post, great-great-granddaughter of protocol maven Emily Post and coauthor of the book “Emily Post’s Business Etiquette,” told BI she believes something is lost by using a robot.

Post said a note that someone actually writes by hand is special, not because it shows effort on the part of the sender, but because a person’s penmanship — even if it’s imperfect — is unique to them and to a moment.

“It makes that handwritten version that much more precious and amazing and special,” Post said.

Wachs said that critics have a point when they say part of writing a letter is to demonstrate that someone took the time to do it. Yet, he said, many people are simply too busy.

“Often, the choice is not Handwrytten note or actual handwritten note. The choice is Handwrytten note or nothing,” he said.

Wachs, whose business relies on 55 workers and 185 robots, said that the results are convincing enough to help job seekers, business owners, marketers, and others distinguish themselves.

“My wife will receive notes from her friends that use our service,” Wachs said. “And she’ll be like, ‘Wow, they have beautiful handwriting.”

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AI Research

Agencies and industry announce efforts to further Presidential AI Challenge

Published

59 minutes ago

September 4, 2025

Alexandra Kelley

First Lady Melania Trump and multiple cabinet leaders on Thursday unveiled the next steps in the White House’s Presidential AI Challenge — a program mandated in an April executive order and launched Aug. 26 — and how the Trump administration is planning to keep the U.S. at the forefront of AI innovation and education.

The remarks were made at the second White House Task Force on Artificial Intelligence Education meeting and were accompanied by pledges from government agencies and the private sector to advance AI education, as mandated by the order.

“We are here today to talk about our future in the most real sense imaginable: how America’s children can be prepared to build our country tomorrow with the cutting edge tools of today,” White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios said during the meeting. “We are proud and grateful to announce new steps in fulfilling the mission of this task force and the president’s vision for this AI challenge.”

Those upcoming steps include the release of toolkits, webinars, classroom guides and more, as well as agency action items intended to help cultivate a strong American foundation in AI education within academia and the workforce. These include sector-specific, applied AI training materials and ways to incorporate AI in American classrooms.

“Our goal is to empower states and schools to begin exploring AI integration in a way that works best for their communities,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said during the meeting. “Ed is fully aligned with the Presidential AI Challenge, and is encouraging students and educators to explore AI technologies with curiosity and with creativity. It’s not one of those things to be afraid of. Let’s embrace it.”

Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins spotlighted the expansive partnerships between the agency and external entities to bring AI systems into agrarian workflows.

“Far too often for those living and working in our rural parts of our country, that often those are left behind and do not always have the same access to the most recent technological innovations that our urban counterparts across the country do,” Rollins said. “We cannot let that happen with AI.”

USDA will focus on bringing AI systems into agricultural workflows and education, particularly for predictive analyses based on existing agriculture knowledge and data. Sensor systems, robotics and automation are all areas that are slated to modernize the agricultural industry, with help from private sector partners like Microsoft and academia, including Iowa State University and Texas State University.

Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer said her agency is expanding AI access and literacy through several vehicles — notably via apprenticeship opportunities, part of Labor and Commerce’s joint Talent Strategy that was released earlier in August.

“On-the-job training programs will help fill the mortgage paying jobs that AI will create, while also enhancing the unique skills required to succeed in various industries,” Chavez-DeRemer said. “Expanding these opportunities is a key component of our strategy to reach the president’s goal of 1 million new, active apprentices across the United States.”

Chavez-DeRemer also previewed pending partnerships to help disseminate AI education and training materials across the country, along with future best practices for effective AI literacy training.

Several private sector companies were also in attendance to explain their commitments towards supporting the initiative, noting that developing and expanding AI education is necessary to keep up with the demands of the growing AI-centric labor market. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and IBM CEO Arvind Krishna announced their companies’ individual billion- and million-dollar commitments, respectively, to bolster AI education within academia and the existing workforce.

“This is all in the service of helping the next generation to solve problems, fuel innovation and build an incredible future,” Pichai said. “These are all goals we all share. We are incredibly thankful for the partnership and the leadership from the first lady, the president and the administration, and for showing us the way.”

The updates to the Presidential AI Challenge reflect the Trump administration’s no-holds-barred approach to both incorporating AI and machine learning into the government and ensuring the U.S. will lead in new AI technologies at the global level.

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AI Research

UWF receives $100,000 grant from Air Force to advance AI and robotics research

Published

2 hours ago

September 4, 2025

Tanner Stewart

PENSACOLA, Fla. — The University of West Florida was just awarded a major grant to help innovate cutting-edge technology in Artificial Intelligence.

The US Air Force Research Laboratory awarded $100,000 to UWF’s Intelligent Systems and Robotics doctorate program.

The grant supports research in Artificial Intelligence and robotics while training PhD students.

The funding was awarded to explore how these systems can support military operations, but also be applied to issues we could face here locally like DISA.

Unlike generative AI in apps like ChatGPT, this research focuses on “reinforcement learning.”

“It’s action-driven. It’s designed to produce strategies versus content and text or visual content,” said Dr. Kristen “Brent” Venable with UWF.

Dr. Venable is leading the research.

Her team is designing simulations that teach autonomous systems like robots and drones how to adapt to the environment around them without human help — enabling the drones to make a decision on their own.

“So if we deployed them and let them go autonomously, sometimes far away, they should be able to decide whether to communicate, whether to go in a certain direction,” she said.

The initial goal of the grant is to help the US military leverage machine learning.

But Dr. Venable says the technology has potential to help systems like local emergency management during a disaster.

“You can see how this could be applied for disaster response,” she said. “Think about having some drones that have to fly over a zone and find people to be rescued or assets that need to be restored.”

Dr. Venable says UWF is poised to deliver on their promises to innovate the technology.

The doctorate program was created with Pensacola’s Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, giving students access to world-class AI and robotics research.

Over the last five years, the program has expanded to more than 30 students.

“We are very well positioned because the way we are, in some sense, lean and mean is attractive to funding agencies,” Dr. Venable said. “Because we can deliver results while training the next generation.”

The local investment by the Air Force comes as artificial intelligence takes center stage nationally.

On Thursday, First Lady Melania Trump announced a presidential AI challenge for students and educators.

President Trump has also signed an executive order to expand AI education.

Dr. Venable says she’s confident the administration’s push for research will benefit the university’s efforts, as the one-year grant will only go so far.

“I think the administration is correctly identifying as a key factor in having the US lead on the research,” she said. “It’s a good seedling to start the conversation for one year.”

The research conducted at UWF and the IHMC are helping put the area on the map as an intelligence hub.

Dr. Venable says they’re actively discussing how to apply for more grants to help with this ongoing research.

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