Meet Sandy

wood.tang — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 15:37:56 -0500

I Want Sandy is an email-based, automated personal assistant created by Rael Dornfest and values of n, makers of Stikkit. I’ve been messing around with her (in a totally platonic way) since Cory Doctorow mentioned it last week, and it’s really slick.

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.

”Meet Sandy” was written by Matt Wood for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 21, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"