Evie is an AI personal assistant that’s as affordable as Netflix

Photo credit: Pixabay.

Meet my personal assistant, Evie. She schedules my meetings, knows when I’m available, as well as when and where I prefer to meet. She works day and night, juggling different time zones, toiling hard to coordinate calls. She never complains about her workload.

Evie is a bot. More than that, she’s a personal assistant for the 99 percent. “A real assistant will cost you thousands of dollars,” says Lee Jin Hian, co-founder and CTO of Mimetic.ai, the Singapore-based startup that birthed Evie amidst code and cloud.

“We think there’s a huge opportunity for people who wouldn’t otherwise have an assistant.”

While the startup hasn’t nailed down the exact pricing for its subscription service, it’ll be in the region of what Netflix or Spotify costs. As someone who’s been using Evie for months now, it sounds like an offer that’s hard to refuse.

Hello, Evie

The first time I met Evie was through someone else in the tech industry. He used Evie to coordinate a meeting with me, and I thought she was a real person.

Later, he asked: “How did you find Evie?” It’s an odd question, and that’s when I realized she wasn’t human.

I’ve had many dalliances with bots – on both Facebook and Telegram – but they’re gimmicky at best and annoying at worst.

Evie is the only bot I use regularly, depending on the number of meetings I have in a given week. Two of my colleagues are also using it, though less intensely than before.

It works as advertised. Include her in your email thread, and say something like “Hey Evie, please schedule a Skype call with John and Amy.”

She jumps in, puts you in BCC, and when the others confirm a timing, she sends out a calendar invite to all parties, which includes your contact information or office address. Your calendar is then automatically updated.

Under the hood

Making Evie more human