Showing posts with label Personal Assistant. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Personal Assistant. Show all posts

Monday, February 22, 2010

Astrid Android App is Your Own Personal Assistant

Astrid Android App is Your Personal Assistant

Between work, kids, a social life, and other obligations, you probably often find yourself wishing you had a personal assistant. If you're an Android owner, now you can! Meet Astrid! Astrid is according to its website, "to-do list / task tracking system for Google’s Android platform built with your productivity in mind. Astrid’s goal is to be simple to use with the features you need to stay productive and get things done."

The app manages the deadlines and priorities on your to-do list so you don't have to. The app is free and it organizes your tasks by date and time. Simply enter the task - anything from "go grocery shopping" to "pick up the kids from school" - and the date and time, tag it with tags such as "important," "work," or "bills" and you can even enter how much time you belief the task will take.

Once you've created a reminder, you can determine if it's to reoccur or if it's just a one-time activity. You can also decide if you want the phone to notify you at the time the task is scheduled, before it's scheduled, or at the absolute deadline (something else you can fill in). A task meter shows you how many of your tasks you've completed and you can even hide certain entries. And every once in a while, the app will give you a reminder to do something such as, "When you have a minute: Clean out your inbox."



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Saturday, February 6, 2010

Meet Your New iPhone Personal Assistant

Ever wish you could bark orders at your technology and have it do exactly what you asked? If you're an iPhone owner, your wish is becoming much more realistic thanks to Siri. The artificial intelligence-based voice-recognition startup has created an iPhone app that takes your questions and fields them to the appropriate search engine or web service.

To use the app, you simply voice a command into your phone. The app takes the sound, interprets your request, displays a transcript of your words and then searches for an answer. The results are displayed and you can tap the screen to correct or adjust the information.

While, other phones, such as Google's Nexus One do have voice recognition abilities, Siri is the first to actually interpret your words. The Nexus One simply displays a transcript of what you say, so that you don't have to type it. Siri was created out of artificial intelligence research done at SRI, a lab located in Silicon Valley that was also the birthplace of the mouse and graphical user interface.

The app can answer questions such as "Will it storm today" and "Where can I go to get a hamburger" because it's integrated with about twenty information services such as Yelp, CitySearch, and OpenTable. Others are expected to connect in the future. According to Wired.com, it will also answer more specific questions and commands such as, "Find the nearest Chase bank."

The app is free and can be downloaded from the iTunes App Store. You must have an iPhone 3GS to make use of it, but the company is currently working on a version compatible with older phones, as well. To see more about the new app, check out the video below.








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