All posts tagged: AI assistant

Viral AI assistant Instinct now has its own email address

Viral AI assistant Instinct now has its own email address

Published by skeptic

Instinct, the buzzy new AI assistant now valued at $2.5 billion, is rolling out a new feature that will allow it to do more on its users’ behalf: it’s giving everyone Instinct email addresses. The company’s founder Noah Shinn said on Tuesday that the new email addresses let the agent create and run its own accounts without cluttering up users’ inboxes. Shinn said the idea is to allow Instinct to handle the account sign-up and management for you if it needs to do so for completing tasks that require email, like creating accounts on various services, contacting businesses, and following up on things that need attention. “For example, Instinct can use its own email to contact a restaurant about a special request, ask a business about availability, or sign up for a service it needs to complete your task,” Shinn wrote on X. We’re giving Instinct access to more tools. Starting today, your Instinct will have its own email address. This is the first step towards enabling your Instinct to own and run its own …

Equal AI raises M to screen calls so Indians don’t have to

Equal AI raises $30M to screen calls so Indians don’t have to

Published by skeptic

In India, consumers receive a lot of calls every day, ranging from spam and scams to delivery people and financial service companies trying to contact them. There are apps like Truecaller and the government’s Calling Name Presentation (CNAP) system to identify who is calling, but knowing the name of the caller is often not enough. That is why Equal AI is creating an assistant that can receive calls on your behalf, gather information, and tell you why someone is calling. The app is currently available on Android, and since its launch last year, it has grown to more than a million monthly active users and over 300,000 daily active users, it says. The app screens the call and displays the reason someone is calling you. The dialer shows quick reply options like “Leave the delivery near the door” or “Give it to the neighbor,” and the AI reads them back to the caller. You can also type a custom message for the AI to read out. The app records the call, and users can see …

I put Google’s 24/7 AI assistant Gemini Spark to work, and it’s actually pretty useful

I put Google’s 24/7 AI assistant Gemini Spark to work, and it’s actually pretty useful

Published by skeptic

Gemini Spark is Google’s new 24/7 agentic assistant, designed to help you help you “navigate your digital life,” which essentially means getting your online to-dos done, summarizing the things you don’t have time to read (like the entirety of your inbox), or organizing something that would have otherwise involved too much screen time-filled manual labor, like a personal expenses spreadsheet. The service was first introduced at Google’s annual developer conference in May, where CEO Sundar Pichai joked that Spark, which runs on virtual machines in the cloud, means that “yes, you can close your laptop.” The in-joke here is that he’s comparing Spark to other agentic AI systems, like the ever-popular OpenClaw, which require keeping the machine awake to run its tasks. Spark, he’s suggesting, is agentic AI for the rest of us — those who would rather get things done without nerding out about it by setting up an always-on AI machine. In practice, Spark is still very much designed for work-adjacent tasks, given its integration with Google’s productivity apps like Gmail, Calendar, Docs, …

Poppy debuts a proactive AI assistant to help organize your digital life

Poppy debuts a proactive AI assistant to help organize your digital life

Published by skeptic

Smartphones can be distracting with their dizzying array of apps and constant stream of notifications. A new app called Poppy aims to organize the chaos by combining your calendar, email, messages and other sources into a single dashboard. The idea, per the company’s website, is that “Poppy pays attention so you don’t have to.” Users can connect various services to Poppy’s app, like their email, calendar, and, at a minimum, their location. Poppy then uses that data along with AI to guess what’s important to you right now based on what’s going on in your life. At a high level, this means you can open Poppy’s app or glance at its widgets to see the meetings or tasks you have on your plate. But Poppy’s most powerful feature is likely its proactive suggestions. Image Credits:Poppy/Second Nature Computing For instance, if Poppy has access to your calendar and sees that you have a 30-minute gap while you’re near a park, it could suggest you take a break and go for a walk before your next appointment. …

Yelp’s updated AI assistant can answer questions and book a restaurant or service in one conversation

Yelp’s updated AI assistant can answer questions and book a restaurant or service in one conversation

Published by skeptic

For years, existing consumer platforms have tried to keep users within their app by offering more services. After the rise of the AI chatbot, the trend is to have people use the assistant for both queries and actions without leaving the conversational flow. With its latest update, Yelp is letting people ask questions, get restaurant reservations, order food delivery, and book service professionals, all through its updated AI assistant. The company debuted the AI assistant in 2024 to help people search for different services based on their problem. It is now using the platform data paired with an AI assistant to let users do more tasks. In a demo seen by TechCrunch, the company’s SVP of product, Akhil Kuduvalli Ramesh, searched for hiking places to go with a dog without a leash; looked for takeout places along the way, with an option to place an order on Doordash; looked for restaurant recommendations for a weekend plan, with an option to check out availability and book a table; and queried about painting a friends’ new Victorian …

Fathom adds a bot-less meeting mode in a bid to take on Granola

Fathom adds a bot-less meeting mode in a bid to take on Granola

Published by skeptic

Online meetings these days are crowded. The abundance of note-taking assistants means that everyone has their own meeting assistant join calls to transcribe and summarize the conversation, which results in overcrowded meeting rooms. Fathom, a startup that makes an AI note-taking tool, is trying to address that overcrowding issue with an update that enables its app to transcribe all calls you attend without requiring an AI assistant to join them. Now, this isn’t anything new. We already have several desktop apps like like Granola, Talat, Notion and ChatGPT that can transcribe calls. Fathom says it is trying to improve on those tools by enabling its app to record videos, too, and its users can choose between various recording modes for transcribing calls. The company said it focused on getting speaker diarization right to make it easier for users to recall context. “A lot of these bot-less tools don’t indicate who said what in their captured transcript,” Fathom’s CEO Richard White told TechCrunch over a call. As an example, he said many people face problems with …