Marissa Mayer, the former Yahoo CEO, has unveiled Dazzle, a personal AI assistant that raised an $8 million seed round last December. Unlike competing products from Meta and others that rely on email, calendar and shopping data, Dazzle takes a distinctive approach by using only photographs from a user's camera roll to build context about their life. This unconventional strategy centres on Mayer's belief that photos are an underappreciated source of information capable of revealing hobbies, interests, preferences and lifestyle patterns.

The assistant offers two main functions: scanning recent photos to handle immediate tasks such as populating calendars from event flyers or finding services mentioned in images, and mining the entire photo library to generate personalised suggestions for holidays, gifts and family activities. Testing demonstrated the tool can make thoughtful recommendations based on photo history—such as suggesting Mediterranean holiday destinations based on past trips—though it showed some limitations in remembering specific details. Mayer contends that the photo-based approach may appeal to users concerned about the security issues that have affected competing personal AI assistants.