Sandy’s my friend, is she yours?
I have fell in love with Sandy over the time I’ve used her services and I thought many others enlisted her as well. Apparently I’m wrong. Yes Sandy has tons of customers, but she isn’t as popular as she should be. So today, I will be sharing with you the beauty that is Sandy.
Who’s this Sandy girl?
OK, lets pretend you haven’t heard of Sandy. Why do I keep referring to this person and “using” her? Sandy is a virtual personal assistant. Just think of her as Fonsworth Bentley except she doesn’t cost you anything and you never get to hang out with her at the club. She is the brainchild of Rael Dornfest (of O’Reilly fame) and the Values of N crew.
If she’s a personal assistant, can she get me drinks?
Well not exactly. She’s more of the scheduling type of assistant, not the one you cheat on your wife with. She is very handy though. She can: remember things (ie names/numbers/email addresses), remind you of upcoming events, and create a list (ie to-do lists or grocery list). Of course, she can easily retrieve this information for you. Also, she can forget things you don’t need anymore.
Well fine. If she’s virtual, how do I talk to her?
Again, they’ve thought that out for you and provided plenty of avenues for communication. The most obvious is sending her an email. She parses the title of the email and does the appropriate action. Also she is compatible with SMS (cell phone) messages, Twitter (rejoice twitter-holics!), and Jott. You should have no problem getting/sending information.
Yeah thats cool. What makes her special though?
Aside from the free part, she is feature packed. Lets say you saved quite a few contacts. Well you’re out in the city at lunch and need a phone number quick. Wow, thats unlucky since it isn’t saved in your phone either. What do you do? Just send an email to Ms. Sandy (or visit her website on your phone). In the title add the field ‘@sms’ and she’ll reply directly to your phone and not your email or twitter or jott. The same can be done for any service. She can also reply to all your services at once. Lets say you need the phone number and so does your boss. Thats cool, just CC him in an email and he’ll be sent the information as well. Your boss then can become your “friend” and thus Sandy enlists a social networking aspect to her service.
Well that sounds great, but there has to be a problem right?
Problems are so relative these days. By default, Sandy sends you an email everyday with your “Daily Digest” of things to do. For people like me who use iCal, Google Calendar, or some other scheduling service this feature can get annoying. Luckily there is a way to turn it off in the settings. Also, since we’re on the topic of calendar services it could be very cool if Sandy could interface directly with these services. Its not something I expect out of Sandy, but it would definitely be impressive and make many people’s lives easier. Another downfall lies the the SMS/text service. I would like to be be able to text message her to add/retrieve information. It’d be nice if she had an phone number in which she can get the right information based off of the phone number requesting it. The only other Sandy downfall I perceive is the face Sandy only understand certain conversation context. Although not a problem for me, I can see a speech adjustment required by some. I do know though, that the Values of N team is working on getting the best conversation context it can. Also every program requires some some of learning curve to get the best results. For Sandy, its just the way you talk to her.
So Will, what do you think overall?
I have fallen in love with Sandy and use her often. When I finally decide to spend the extra money for unlimited texts on my cell phone, I will be using her even more (with the @sms command). Even though I really miss not being able to send her texts to add/retrieve information, I would still recommend her. She is definitely worth checking out if you have a large base of friends, use the internet often, frequently forget things, have a hectic schedule, or work with tech-savvy people.
Find out more at: http://www.iwantsandy.com
Here’s a cheat sheet of common commands: http://iwantsandy.com/help/cheatsheet
Tags: assistant, email, iwantsandy, jott, personal, personal assistant, Sandy, sms, twitter, values of n
