This post is brought to you by Agent.ai.
Not all businesses can afford a full-time staff of phone operators. And let’s be honest: Frustration with automated systems can leave customers looking for another place to do business.
Agent.ai has created something that bridges the gap — a customer relationship management (CRM) system that’s powered by machine learning. It comes in two forms: Co-Pilot and Auto-Pilot.
It will be years before we get to see how simple and amazing a car designed by Apple will be, but for now a new hardware startup created by ex-Apple engineers is ready to give us the next best thing.
Pearl Automation, an autonomous car tech startup co-founded by Apple veteran Bryson Gardner, revealed its first product today that makes your dumb car smarter by adding a new feature usually only found on luxury vehicles.
If you have an extra $11.5 million sitting around, and you’ve always wanted to live somewhere that looks like a great place to plan a heist while your robot butler serves you drinks, we may have found your new home.
The house at 535 Haynes Avenue in Beverly Hills once belonged to tycoon, filmmaker, and real-life Iron Man, Howard Hughes. And if its classic charm and amazing views weren’t enough for you, it’s also entirely automated and runs from an iPad.
You can see more of the swanky house in the video below.
A new app called Workflow aims to close the divide between the power of OS X and the convenience of iOS. By offering curated and custom workflows, the app can automate just about anything you’d want to do on the iPhone or iPad — along with actions you probably haven’t thought of before, like calling an Uber car to take you to your next meeting with one tap.
It’s an ambitious undertaking for any developer, but what makes Workflow even better is that it was created by two brilliant teenagers with great aspirations for making mobile devices as powerful as they can be.
Maybe you scan all your receipts and bills, and toss the paper into the recycling bin. Congratulations! You’re paperless. You’re also out of luck when it comes to actually finding any of those scans when you need them. You’ll be stuck flipping through stacks of PDFs as if they were stacks of paper.
Unless you get your Mac to automatically run OCR on those scans, making their text searchable. And then maybe you could have you Mac file them for you too, just like computers were supposed to do for us all along.
Sound good? Then check out this neat tutorial from Mac Power Users’ Katie Floyd, which uses Applescript, PDFPen and Hazel to do it all for you.
I probably wouldn’t written anything about the new Netatmo Weather Station Channel on IFTTT, but then I saw one of the sample automatic actions that it can trigger, and figured I had to show you. Once set up, you can have IFTTT send a Twitter DM to your roommate when his music is too loud. Amazing.
Jawbone has announced the UP24, a tweaked version of its troubled UP activity-tracking wristband. It’s mostly the same, with a cool futuristic look and $150 price tag. The difference is that it now uses “Bluetooth Smart,” which lets it communicate with your iPhone in real time to send alerts and notifications.
But what’s really interesting is that it now has a rather useful IFTTT channel.
IFTTT has gotten a big update today in the form of proper Reminders and Photos integration for iOS. Before, you could have it do some clever automatic thing when you added a new photo or reminder to the respective iPhone apps, but now IFTTT can create reminders and add pictures to any album. It’s pretty sweet, and would be awesome but for one big gotcha.
Say hello to CubeSensors, sensitive little cubes that detect pretty much everything and tattle to your iPhone about it. The cubes are internet-connected, so you can get their information anywhere, any time.
Drafts, the default inbox for text on your iOS device, has just been updated to version 1.5 on the iPad and v2.5 on the iPhone. And, man, what an update!
Previously, Drafts was a great way to scribble down a note, and then send it off to pretty much any text-based app you could think of. Now, with two big new features called “URL Actions” and “Dropbox Actions,” Drafts not only becomes more powerful than you could possible imagine, it also lets you automate a whole lot of notetaking tasks.
How powerful are we talking about here? How about controlling your Mac at home from your iPhone by just jotting down a note?
