Amy, a digital assistant who schedules your meetings, just raised $23 million
Last week I hired a personal assistant named Amy Ingram. She set up four meetings for me, adding them to my calendar with the relevant contact details included. She rescheduled twice when the person I was supposed to meet had to cancel at the last minute. Instead of sending half a dozen emails per meeting, I only needed to compose one to kick things off. This all sounds like pretty simple stuff, but Amy isn’t a human being: it’s a virtual assistant made by the New York City startupX.ai. Today the company announced a $23 million round of funding it will use to accelerate its development.
Amy exemplifies a new frontier in personal computing: the conversational smart bot. “There is a paradigm shift about to happen in how software is being delivered,” says Dennis Mortensen, the founder and CEO of X.ai. “I just don’t believe that apps is the future.” The data backs that up. Consumers are experiencing app fatigue: the average person downloads zero apps per month, and spends 80 percent of their time in just three of the apps they do use. That’s why an increasing number of developers are trying to circumvent the app store and reach consumers by making the basic email and messaging tools we use every day smarter.
“Instead of being assisted in doing a given job, you are handing it over to an agent,” says Mortensen. To make sure I could trust my new agent, Amy included me as a BCC on its first batch of scheduling emails. I have to admit, they were a lot more coherent and polite than the scheduling emails I usually send. Over time, Amy promises to learn my habits and plan my calendar to minimize the chance that I make an ass of myself.
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