x.ai’s Amy is focused on perfecting scheduling technology
NEW YORK–In a multitasking world, x.ai founder Dennis Mortensen likes Amy to do one thing but to do it better than anyone else. That means better than humans, because she is an “it” or artificial intelligence, to be exact. Amy or x.ai is a personal assistant who schedules for you.
Mortensen was at the NUI meetup last April 20 to discuss where Amy is headed. Nope, she can’t help you google a trip for you yet, but she at least knows how to schedule for you, which Google Voice and Siri can’t do yet. This is perhaps the reason why some attendees are clearly big fans of Amy, because it can book an appointment for you by simply arranging meetings for you via email where other A.I.s can only do search.
We wonder if Amy can eventually recover lost notes, as this story had to rely on memory after the notes disappeared, but Mortensen plays it conservatively when questions persist about what Amy can also do. His recent secured funding, a
$9.2 million in a Series A financing led by FirstMark Capital, may just vanish too if x.ai tries to do too much. His budget can only do so much.
Right now, all Mortensen is saying as he further develops Amy is to get more data. That’s where the seed money is going, so he can see a fully emulated human scheduling negotiator in Amy.
A question was asked if Amy will have a dashboard or some visual interface—and Mortensen doesn’t mince words and says no. Right now, the process is simple. You cc Amy on first contact with an email respondent, then she does the rest of the follow-ups for you—you just sit back and let Amy do the worrying. By the way, the system does not require no sign-in, no password, no download, you just cc to amy@x.ai when you’re planning a meeting with anyone.
Amy sends a meeting invite to you and your guest for the agreed upon time. The date, time and location will align to your personal preferences, your current free/busy time and the constraints set by your guest. You obviously don’t see any of this, you just receive the invite – and will be looking forward to a chat with your vendor, without having to deal with the two days of stress scheduling it.
Amy recently got good press from CBS News which said: “Amy feels like the future. Even more than Siri and Google Now, she seems seamlessly human and as effective as a real person doing the same task.”
