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Meet Sandy
Matt Wood | Nov 21 2007
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. POSTED IN:
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Does she have a brother?
Cool; is there a male equivalent for those of us who don’t swing Sandy’s way? I’ve never liked the MS Office paper clip (or the dog), but Sandy doesn’t seem to be my type, either.
Yup it's good
I’ve been using Sandy for a few months now, and it’s really very nice. I liked Stikkit as well, but this reincarnation is quite good.
What you come to really appreciate after a while is the “lookup” command, which is very powerful
That said, the radio silence that the guys behind Sandy/Stikkit fall in to sometimes is somewhat discomforting.
But definitely a great thing to check.
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. :(
Another Option
Not trying to change direction - recently switched to rememberthemilk.com. Very similar - use twitter to send text messages to so they will be added. Very nice if you think when away from a computer but can’t talk.
Sandy Committed to You?
I signed up but am wary about how many of these sites pop up. See previous comment on rememberthemilk.com. I’m being careful about committing too much to one site to only have it one-upped by another site.
Re: Meet Sandy
I am very interested in hearing how people are “stacking” these services. I Jott to Sandy and she texts me reminders on my cell. That’s great because it saves me from having to set my own reminder. But it seems to me that this is close to actually being able to do an action. What actions can be done by email — and can Sandy do them?
I think she might be real...
This is the FIRST reminder / to do / scheduling tool - apart from a basic calendar that I have ever had any success with. And I have found myself actually being polite to Sandy because I am so happy…and I am finding it hard to remember that someone isn’t actually sending me all those reminders.
Is it worrying that I actually put “please” and “thank you” at the end of each of my reminder emails to her? Seems so rude not to really….
Sandy use outside of USA
One hassle with Sandy is that it only supports text messaging with US based carriers. Hopefully this will change in the future but there is a workaround for non-US users, at least if you have a Symbian operating system (most common in Nokias).
You can use TWITTER and link your Twitter to the FRING.COM (“fring”) symbian applet. fring (small f) allows Symbian users to use the data channel of their GSM phones to make Skype, SkypeOut, SIP and GTalk voice calls. It also supports chat services from Skype, GTalk and Twitter.
So the Twitter chat channel via fring becomes a Sandy channel.
You can see some stuff I wrote about this on the fring.com blog (australia) here )