The start-up x.ai develop the artificial intelligence-based Amy virtual assistant that can scan your mail and easily plan your agenda.
Overwhelmed by the number of messages that reach your email inbox? Email management has become one of the most tedious tasks of our daily routine. The huge number of emails we receive daily is one of the reasons behind low productivity: we spend 14% of our time reading and responding to messages.
If our tips for improving email management weren’t enough, artificial intelligence has come to your aid. Email management problems are experienced by the vast majority of the population. How to solve them?
When 2012 ended, the entrepreneur Dennis Mortensen he gave an account of the number of meetings he had held during that year. He counted a total of 1,019, of which he had had to change date or time almost 700. The modifications in appointments and meetings had been mostly by mail, which had worsened the number of pending messages in his tray.
Tired of this poor e-mail management, Mortensen called his friend Alex Poon. Both decided to conduct a simple experiment: they would be in charge of managing each other’s agenda and planning their meetings. Some time later, they found that it was much easier to manage someone else’s appointments than their own. That’s how it came about. X.ai, a start-up dedicated to the development of a virtual assistant based on artificial intelligence, capable of scanning our mail and arranging meetings.
The software, as invisible as it is efficient, was called Amy. This bot, which shows one of the great applications of artificial intelligence, is still in beta. The idea is not about downloading a new mobile app, but that when responding to an email for a meeting, let’s simply put amy@x.ai in cc. The software will take care of everything else, sending you the data of the fixed appointment directly.
Amy works thanks to a type of artificial intelligence technology, based on the natural language processing. That is, the program is responsible for ‘breaking’ the message into pieces, classifying each sentence properly and finally arranging the appointment through its own email. According to Mortensen, Amy has a success rate in 98% of cases if the messages are simple. If you work with more complex situations or more convoluted phrases, the hit rate is somewhat lower.
Amy’s arrival shows how much we need this kind of technology in our lives. Can you imagine a future where we don’t have to answer dozens of emails just to set up meetings, cancel appointments or post coffee with customers? Artificial intelligence can, without a doubt, facilitate the management of our email and agenda, thus improving our productivity.
Images | x.ai
