Amy, a digital assistant designed to schedule meetings, signals the arrival of task-oriented bots

Shawn Knight

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Move over Alexa, Cortana, Siri and Google Now – there’s a new digital assistant in town with a laser focus. Amy is the brainchild of X.ai, a New York City startup that recently announced a $23 million round of funding.

Dennis Mortensen, founder and CEO of X.ai, tells The Verge that there is a paradigm shift about to happen in how software is being delivered, adding that he doesn’t’ believe apps are the future. As the publication points out, there’s data to back up that belief as consumers are experiencing what's known as app fatigue.

As far back as 2014, most smartphone users in the US were downloading zero apps per month and spending 80 percent of their time with mobile devices in just three apps. Unsurprisingly, it’s leading many developers to try and come up with new ways to reach mobile users that doesn’t involve app stores.

Last month, Microsoft spent a significant amount of time during its Build conference discussing a future involving bots (and quickly brushing aside Tay, its social chat bot that was corrupted by the Internet in less than a day). Next week, Facebook is expected to unveil a bot store for its Messenger platform. Oh, and don’t forget about Echo, Amazon’s surprise hit product driven by a personal assistant named Alexa.

It’s not by accident or coincidence that these tech giants are turning their attention to bots, especially considering all of them failed to jump on the mobile boat.

At X.ai, they’re keeping a laser focus on one goal; that is, for Amy not only to excel, but be “world class” at a single task – scheduling meetings.

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Sadly, so many of them are packed with bots and constant running "junk" that I end up deleting them after a few hours because of the tremendous overhead they put on the battery. Even the paid for stuff is going this same route and while they might eliminate the pop-ups and other ads, they are always running in the background, draining the life out of the batteries.
 
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