There is no shortage of personal assistant apps out there. We’ve had a look at some of them in the past and remain in awe of some of them. Microsoft’s Cortana. Google’s Assistant. Amazon’s Alexa. They’re smarter, wittier and will mostly get the job done. They’re not without their faults.
So, is there a need for another personal assistant? Maybe, maybe not. There’s only one way to find out if you are an app developer: actually make one. In the case of popular to-do app Any.do, it’s not an out and out personal assistant as such but it’s something that chimes in when your appointment list appears to be struggling and offer to organize things. Say you scheduled a conference call at 2PM and have several other things to do simultaneously that don’t involve the use of your phone. Wouldn’t it be a good idea, then, that someone takes care of getting things started in the mean time?
The Any.do assistant will offer to auto-complete tasks any time such a need arises.
The feature, though, is only limited to early testers at the moment. Other users will have to wait a bit.
What these other users can access right now once they upgrade to the latest version of the app which is currently available on the Play Store, is the calendar integration. You don’t need to go with Any.do maker’s preferred Cal app (which they also make/develop). The app simply calls up your calendar app, looks up your schedules/appointments/events and adds them to your day’s to-do list. Easy.
A toggle at the top of the app lets users decide whether to view calendar events on the app or not.
Google’s photo app, Google Photos, has a similar feature which checks all images uploaded and then does on-the-spot determinations as the photos are uploaded and tries to make sense of them by tapping into Google’s massive machine learning platform and then serving up more relevant and organized information.
The features which are currently hitting the Any.do Android app have been available on iOS for a while.
