The Smart Bots Are Coming, and This One Is Brilliant

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.

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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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