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Launch HN: Life Bot (YC S17) – Voice app to help with daily activities

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Launch HN: Life Bot (YC S17) – Voice app to help with daily activities

#1
Hey HN!

We are Jess and Oscar, the founders of Life Bot, a voice app that helps you complete daily activities.

It’s available on Amazon Alexa. To enable, say “Alexa, enable Life Bot” or click on:

https://alexa.amazon.com/spa/index.html#skills/dp/B0749C8YD5...

Alexa is useful for things like timers, music, and news, but so far, most people don’t bother with Alexa apps. Voice apps are hard to find, they tend to do just one thing, and each has a different name and set of phrasing you need to remember.

Life Bot solves this by bringing the most-used features under one voice app. We’ve made the on-boarding process easy and have eliminated the need to visit the Alexa app. We also aren't tied to just an echo device, since users aren’t always at home.

A popular feature we have is morning news - Life Bot gives your morning headlines through Alexa, but can send the full article to your phone to read up on your commute. Or you can set up a reminder to pick up milk through Alexa, and have it sent to you by text at 5pm the next day. SMS reminders are our most popular feature!

Oscar and I first started working with Alexa in 2015. We set up Europe’s first "voice design agency" to build Alexa Skills for large brands. We experienced first hand the problems of discoverability, setup, and usability with Skills, and saw a huge opportunity to create the first voice app that people love.

Long term, our aim for Life Bot is that it becomes the only voice app you need – providing a consistent experience across all voice platforms and devices.

We’re excited about voice as a new tech interface and are convinced of the trend in voice. In our view, it won’t be long before voice interfaces will become the first port of call over a phone.

We’d love to hear your feedback on the Life Bot voice app, and looking forward to discussing anything voice related!

We’d also love to know, what do you wish Alexa could do that it can’t already?

Re: Launch HN: Life Bot (YC S17) – Voice app to help with daily activities

#6

Why? What problem is this solving?

Right now, the biggest problem Life Bot solves for Alexa users is that we bring voice reminders out of the home - If you set a reminder using Alexa, it's only useful if you're around the device to hear it go off. Life Bot sends you your reminder via SMS so where ever you are you'll get it!

As we add more productivity features to Life Bot, we're also removing the need for user's to remember multiple invocation names for different skills.

Finally in the future we see people having to use multiple voice assistants during their day. You might have an Amazon Echo at home, but an Android phone with Google Assistant on it, and maybe even Cortana in your car. Life Bot will be on all platforms which will give you a consistent experience across all of them.

Re: Launch HN: Life Bot (YC S17) – Voice app to help with daily activities

#7

I'm still confused at what voice app is. And the link takes me a to a login page- there's you first problem in terms of discover-ability...

Thanks - agree discoverability is an issue on Alexa! If you have an Alexa device just say "Alexa, enabled Life Bot". Or you can enable directly from amazon.com at this link:

https://www.amazon.com/www-asklifebot-com-Life-Bot/dp/B0749C...

Re: Launch HN: Life Bot (YC S17) – Voice app to help with daily activities

#8
post #5

Do you have a website? Am interested to learn more but I don't have any Alexa-enabled devices, so I can't really use your link.

Yes you can find more info at http://www.asklifebot.com

Right now we're just on Alexa but will be coming to other platforms very soon!

Re: Launch HN: Life Bot (YC S17) – Voice app to help with daily activities

#10

The Life Bot has been really great and responsive around their private Facebook group. They shared that they will be opening up a developer friendly API to allow easy integrations with Alexa. Im looking forward to this.

Thanks!

We're working on ways for developers to enhance Life Bot - stay tuned! :)

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