clock menu more-arrow no yes mobile

Filed under:

The Smart Bots Are Coming, and This One Is Brilliant

The company behind Amy, a digital assistant who schedules your meetings, just raised $23 million.

The Verge

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 startup X.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,” said Dennis Mortensen, the founder and CEO of X.ai.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

Sign up for the newsletter Sign up for Vox Recommends

Get curated picks of the best Vox journalism to read, watch, and listen to every week, from our editors.