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Comment by monkmartinez | Hacker News Reader

This looks awesome. I use reminders in Inbox with reckless abandon, love them. Please tell me there is an open source version of this or that I am missing something in gmail to do this. Pretty please.

That said: There is no way I am spending $49 a month on this. There is a point where you have to analyze how many $5/$10/$15 dollar a month subscriptions you have. Pretty soon it can escalate to the cost of a monthly vehicle payment or the hiring of a part-time employee. Furthermore, can get a human to do this for $10 an hour or so using a virtual assistant?

If I was super-crazy-busy and making ridiculous $$$, sure. But as a cash flow restricted mortal with a mortgage a full time job and a side project... $49 in addition to the myriad of services/equipment I require (accounting, marketing, materials, equipment maintenance, etc) is not going to happen.

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An intelligent assistant is fantastically useful. I sometimes pay $50/month (depending on how much work she does) and she is worth every penny.

E.g., "Deepika, call up brokers and schedule me apartment viewings in $X location for $Y or less, schedule these appointments on monday evening back to back. Do the same for $Z location on tuesday evening."

Of course, Deepika (name changed a little) is actually a real girl; I can only afford her because her choice of birth country allows me to pay less than US minimum wage.

In my experience these robot assistance are not as smart as Deepika. Scheduling in particular is a use case designed to make the user feel important rather than actually save people time. Doodle ( http://doodle.com/ ) substitutes UI for AI, but it works brilliantly. Every email bot I've been the victim of just fobs work off from the user to their counterparty.

How did you find Deepika?

I'm not the OP -- the term to google is VA, virtual assistant. It is, currently, something of a boom industry. One of my friends does it: marywuva.com

She's a former coworker. Sometimes I live in India.

I can't tell if "her choice of birth country" is supposed to be ironic, sarcastic, or some other sly form of commentary...

I presume (hope!) Deepika is a "real woman", and not a "real girl". I'm not trying to scold, but it's worth pointing out that most men wouldn't want to be described as "boys", and the culture that makes it so easy to inadvertently describe ourselves as men and girls rather than men and women has something to do with why we have so few women in computing.

We use the same terminology in many fields with lots of women, so I doubt your hypothesis is true.

If you image search "im a real boy" you'll also understand the reference I was making.

Exactly what I was thinking. If you read the end of TFA you'll see that the main benefit here is that they provide a human force to curate it, etc. That means that even if they open sourced it today it won't do you and me any good without the human element. Then again, if there is an OSS version of this that someone knows of, please do point it out.

Having said that the price is too high for me personally. I'd consider $5/month. Also since I schedule way fewer meetings than the author of TFA, I would need longer than a month to try it out.

> There is no way I am spending $49 a month on this.

You're not the target market then. For that matter, neither am I. The target market is people who need an admin assistant, but can't pay the five figures per year yet.

I'd wager the largest market for this service is b2b companies of all sizes. Hand this to the entire sales team. Sit back and watch the money roll in.

Or pay for VA's that can do a LOT more for close to the same price?

I see your point.

However, the price is still steep considering what leading virtual assistant service companies charge. The bonus with a virtual assistant is the "on demand" aspect. Its not a fixed cost per month, every month. When I am really busy, I use it more and consequently pay more and vice versa for when times are slow...

Well there's x.ai as documented here https://medium.com/backchannel/meet-amy-your-personal-ai-ass.... It's even using the same reference to Her in the title graphic.

There's also https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/cubic-your-personal-ai-wi....

And finally there's Facebook M.

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