Evie.ai, is a virtual assistant designed to schedule meetings, with zero challenges or errors. It’s pretty affordable, given its intelligent pricing model – a free trial version for one month, and a $20 per month billing, from there on.
Evie.ai is the brainchild of the Singapore-based startup, Mimetic.ai, and as per a statement from its CTO, Lee Jin Hian, the idea driving the product was to create a virtual assistant that could service ‘the other 99%’, those who cannot afford the heavy salaries of a real personal assistant.
Understanding Evie – under the hood
Evie.ai operates pretty simply. She simply comes in, puts the executive in the ‘bcc’ bar, and once everybody else confirms a timing, she sends out a calendar invite, with contact details, office address, and other relevant information. Of course, ones calendar is also updated.
Evie’s makers were inspired by their experiences of having to manage complex meeting schedules, with multiple locations, timezones, and other such challenges. The product is built on natural language processing (NLP), a number of algorithms, along with some decision-making and reasoning capabilities, in order to process user data and come to the most accurate conclusions.
Evie.ai is the result of rapid advancements in open-source technologies, such as SyntaxNet, an NLP tool, which was architected on Google‘s neural net TensorFlow, along with Stanford University’s CoreNLP toolset.
However, Evie’s creators aren’t looking at extending the app’s capabilities right now. For now, the focus will remain solely on email scheduling. That said, Evie could easily switch over to messaging capabilities, given its current ability to pour through long-winded emails. Evie offers easy integrations with popular email clients such as Gmail and Microsoft Outlook, as well as plugins for business apps, including Salesforce and Slack. These extensions are called ‘Evie Everywhere’, and we could expect several more in the long run.
Humanising Evie’s interface and making it as simple to use as possible, is the company’s primary area of concern, with a conscious drive to shift from staid, machine-like processes and templatized replies, to a more personality-driven response pattern.
Opinions – can Evie take on industry giants?
Evie’s biggest value proposition is the cost advantage, and users can calculate their projected ROI directly on the company website, before considering purchase. The big question is – will Evie be able to fend off other major players in the market – such as Google – who have a stranglehold over the market? For the moment, Evie.ai’s team of six are unworried by such doubts, given that they prefer to take slow, but effective steps towards creating a virtual assistant that’s easy on the pocket, and yet is almost human.
This is an interesting and disarmingly modest approach, which could work for the product.
Let us know your thoughts on Virtual Assistants, or Evie.ai, in the comments below.
