Google ventures into smell digitization.
The introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) into our daily lives has been swift—from self-driving cars to personalized shopping recommendations, we now rely on AI to make us more efficient. Google, a pioneer with its Gemini (formerly Bard) conversational AI model, transcription services, and personalized recommendations on YouTube, has now ventured into a new frontier: digitizing smell.
Sound and vision can be digitized, and now Google aims to tackle a third sense through Osmo, its olfactory startup. Launched with $60 million Series A funding in January 2023 largely from Lux Capital and Google Ventures, Osmo brings together data science, machine learning, olfactory neuroscience, chemistry, and more disciplines to digitize scent. Once unthinkable, Google is now working on cataloging trillions of odor molecules, only 100 million of which are known entities.
“Our work represents the very first step to quantifying our sense of smell,” said Alex Wiltschko, Osmo’s CEO. “Computers have been able to digitize vision and hearing, but not smell—our deepest and oldest sense. The fundamental nature of smell is that it serves as the basis of human survival and plays a formative role in our emotions and memories. Yet, we haven’t been able to develop systematic methods to quantify this important sense. Now that we can control and engineer scents, we will finally be able to take the next step of innovating olfaction to benefit human health and well-being.”
The complex technology developed by Osmo transforms odor molecules into digital ones using sensors and artificial intelligence algorithms. The scent’s chemical makeup is analyzed and then digitized. Smell can be more subjective than other senses, so the challenge lies in collecting the perception of scent and predicting the smell. If a collective, neuroscience-backed understanding of a scent can be determined through scent data, then a scent can be mass-produced to success. In practical applications, that looks like “printing” smells to incorporate into multidimensional, real-world experiences.
By digitizing, reproducing, and manipulating scent, Osmo provides an enhanced, all-encompassing experience that hits on emotions, memories, and social interactions. In the future, the hope is that Osmo can also work in public health and agriculture by detecting disease, aiding food production, and more. Applications abound, such as enhancing a virtual reality experience with scent or customizing personal scents that adapt to a wearer’s mood.
Nostalgia could be brought into surround-scent via smell-based memories. Or smelling the aroma of rare wines only found in Italy—without setting foot in Italy—could deepen an experience. Retail stores could become more multisensory by introducing immersive experiences that speak to a season’s floral-inspired collection, or airlines could pinpoint and deliver on the specific smells of destinations they travel to, such as the Cherry Blossom Festival in Japan.
Additionally, in 2023, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gave a $3.5 million grant to help Osmo gain momentum in the health sector. The money is devoted to looking for and/or producing compounds that repel, attract, or destroy disease-carrying insects, which can, in turn, be applied to human and animal health. It comes on the heels of a preliminary $5 million equity investment made by the foundation when Osmo launched in January 2023.
So far, the innovative information and data powerhouse that is Google has used Osmo to create the world’s first map of odor and developed an Osmograph—or an end-to-end reproduction of a captured scent—to replay specific scents. In this new era of digitizing smell, Osmo’s long-term and admirable goal is to give everyone a chance at a better life.
