Cal Girl

By The Editors
July 18, 2014 9:00 am

Every man has meetings.

No man likes scheduling meetings.

Solution: Amy, an artificially intelligent app (seriously!) that schedules meetings for you, free and available now.

Developed by several Outbrain alums (including a guy who “built software for unmanned aerial vehicles”), Amy takes care of all the “tedious email ping-pong” — i.e., the time/day/place negotiations.

Explains the founder of x.ai: “I came up with this A.I. after I manually scheduled 1,019 meetings in one year … of which 670 had updates and/or were rescheduled at least once.”

Ow. Ow ow ow ow ow.

To start: sign up for the service.* Connect her to your online calendar — Google for now, with Exchange/Outlook coming soon.

Then, on any correspondence that requires a meeting, just cc amy@x.ai. She’ll take care of it for you. The time/place negotiations stay out of sight, out of mind until a final confirmed invite arrives.

(Ed. note: BTW, your assistant’s name, Amy Ingram, is a word play on artificial intelligence and computational linguistics. In an upcoming pro edition, you can customize the name, gender and email address. #nosexism.)

On our test drive this week, we started by emailing Amy our preferences using natural language, e.g. “Amy, no meetings before 10 a.m., please.” It was smooth sailing from there.

She’s a keeper.


*Nota bene: Sign up now and you’ll be on a short wait list. The founders, however, tell us they’ll fast track people who “share a kind tweet about @xdotai and hashtag #insidehook.”

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