Sandy Remembers So You Don’t Have To
October 22nd, 2007 (11:00am) Mike Gunderloy 11 Comments
Who’s Sandy? The persona behind I Want Sandy, the latest application from Values of n, the folks who created Stikkit (which we’re written about before). Sandy functions as your personal email assistant, monitoring any email that you send to her or cc her on, and tracking reminders, contacts, and appointments for you. If you’re the sort of web worker who lives in email, the result is a very low friction way to offload a lot of the details of life until you’re ready for them.
After the signup process (right now, you’ll have to wait in the beta queue for a bit before you get your account), you’ll be assigned your own personal email address for Sandy (which you can customize). You’ll want to spend a few minutes on the web site customizing things like your timezone and your mobile phone number. Then you can put Sandy to work by sending her some email.
For example, tell Sandy “Remind me meeting with Joe Tuesday 3pm” and you’ll get an email and an SMS text message on your phone at 2:45 on Tuesday reminding you about your meeting. “Remind take out trash Weds @weekly” results in weekly messages every Wednesday in your daily digest. If you cc Sandy on a message to someone else, just address her by name: “Sandy, remind me to meet Jim for coffee next Friday at 10AM”.
In the latter case, Sandy will also keep track of Jim as a contact, and send offer to send him a reminder as well. There are customization options for how to deal with contacts. Sandy also builds vcards for contacts and ics files for reminders and sends them back to you, making it easy to go from email to address book to calendar with many other applications. Sandy also tracks miscellaneous information (”Remember parking space 1255 @airport” will produce a tagged note that you can look up on the web site or retrieve by email) and lets you archive things or set them up as todos (so she’ll gently nag you) as well.
All in all, the combination of email, web, SMS, and “smarts” works very well. If you’ve been struggling to find a to-do list that you like (or looking for a personal assistant that you can afford), give I Want Sandy a try.
11 Comments Post your own comment
Dave K says: October 22nd, 2007 11:58am
Although Sandy is pretty, she is more tease that please.
I went to Sandy, plugged it in and tried it and played it. It’s OK but does only half of what rememberthemilk.com does.
I looked and I touched but I will remain faithful to RTM as it has the Reminders, Twitter, Google IG, Email and SMS stuff already. She is an elegant mistress.
LapinLove404 says: October 23rd, 2007 3:07am
Sound a lot like What I currently use Highrise for…
Bt I like the idea of the virtual assistant and the possibility to address her by name in my mail…
I’ll certainly give it a try :-D
bf pierce says: October 25th, 2007 9:52am
wow, she’s pretty hot for a cartoon. if i send her an invitation for a date, do i have a chance?
The Law of Mobility » Blog Archive » Enabling Technology: Week of 10/21/07 says: October 26th, 2007 4:09am
[...] Sandy [...]
» Irony: I want Sandy launches, and I need a reminder to cover it - Silicon Florist says: November 8th, 2007 2:33pm
[...] of n blog. But both were strangely silent about the release.) I just happened to stumble upon a Web Worker Daily post on I want Sandy as I was catching up on [...]
iWantSandy : Personal Assistant in Your Email | MakeUseOf.com says: November 9th, 2007 1:34pm
[...] You can ask it to remind you about events, or even help you organize meetings with friends. WebWorkerDaily “… the combination of email, web, SMS, and “smarts” works very well. If you’ve [...]
WWD Coffee Break - Fusion, Phones & Commercials « Web Worker Daily says: November 13th, 2007 8:01am
[...] - And that’s the case with I Want Sandy, the automated personal assistant via email that we reviewed a while back. Yep, the beta tag has dropped from the site and now anyone can sign up for this [...]
» WWD Coffee Break - Fusion, Phones & Commercials - Your Gadget Pro says: November 13th, 2007 8:46am
[...] - And that’s the case with I Want Sandy, the automated personal assistant via email that we reviewed a while back. Yep, the beta tag has dropped from the site and now anyone can sign up for this [...]
Mayur says: December 2nd, 2007 11:43am
I have started using Sandy in the last day or so, and I have to say its superb! I just love the simple interface and uncluttered design. I think its one thing to manage, organize, categorize, and enter stuff into RTM but Sandy takes 1st place for presenting your lists in a very intuitive way. Working with Sandy is very natural and understandable. Love it. RTM really needs to work on the interface design and think about making it more like someone’s real notebook and less like an excel document.
I want Sandy « Two cultures, one mind. says: December 4th, 2007 4:10am
[...] want Sandy I was tipped off about I want sandy a couple of months ago by the excellent web worker daily site. It’s now moved out of beta, and I’ve started to use it much [...]
Megan says: December 24th, 2007 11:56pm
I tried out the service until I found 2 other ones that I really liked. One is called, ohdontforget.com, which basically allows you to submit things to remember for free.
The other one is a company that you have to pay for called RedButler.com. Their memberships start for 35 dollars per month to place up to 15 requests. The cool thing is that it is a real person you are dealing with. You can call and ask them to remind you about stuff, set wake up calls, book your flights, make reservations and calls. I use them for just about everything I do. Both are great and can be really helpful.
Megan