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Meet Sandy

iwantsandylaunch.jpgI Want Sandy is an email-based, automated personal assistant created by Rael Dornfest and values of n, makers of Stikkit. I've been messing around with her (in a totally platonic way) since Cory Doctorow mentioned it last week, and it's really slick.

Sandy herself is built on Stikkit and named after Tim O'Reilly's real-life assistant. You interact with her by sending emails to a special address, using keywords like "remind me" or "remember to" to tell Sandy what you want to do, just like you would with another person.

Sandy recognizes dates and times in a number of formats, and will send you reminders whenever you assign a specific time. For example, if you wrote "remind me to take out the trash at 5 pm tomorrow," Sandy would note this and send you an email or text reminder close to that time, according to your preferences. You can also email Sandy commands to lookup stuff and send it back to you, very handy if you're on the move with an iPhone or Blackberry, or, you can always manage all your stuff on Sandy's website.

Sandy also supports recurring events and tags, so GTD users could easily turn it into a nice, trusted system with mucho lists and contexts. It even has group functions, so that if you CC Sandy on an email to someone else and give her instructions (Sandy, remember to ...), she'll send reminders to you both.

Combined with a voice service like Jott, Sandy could make an immensely useful personal system for someone who lives in email or is inclined to keep their stuff on the web. That, and she's kinda cute too.

heyvince's picture

I use it with Jott!!

And it is so cool. It takes the "personal assistant" paradigm to the next level. I call Jott and say Sandy and inevitably Sandy does what I expect.

At first I just added the Sandy email in to Jott as a new contact, but that didn't work (probably because Jott sends html emails, instead of plain text. I had to set Sandy up as a Jott Link which was just as easy as setting her up as a contact. The great thing is that iwantsandy includes directions to set this up under settings (I think)

I am stilling trying t figure out a way to get Sandy to actually pick up my dry cleaning, but to no avail. :(

 
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