Life with My Robot Secretary

> My plan was a free trial that would run $50/mo.

My first thought was "ow", but thinking about it more, that's not a bad price point to filter out people who think "oh, that's neat" rather than "oh, thank God, I really need something like that".

I think this is probably both caused by, and in order to take advantage of, personal subconscious bias. Not only do people expect assistants are going to be female, but actually notice when they're male. It's just another small facet of the huge gender inequality problem. Worth noting that you can rename clara if you pay enough and the only competitor that I know of (https://x.ai/) has male and female options.

Some nice PR for Clara, congrats to the Clara team!

I observed this space for some time and came to following conclusion (from an investment perspective):

- There are tons of competitors, some of them very well funded such as x.ai

- Assuming that at some point, let's say 18-24 months the AI of all providers is near perfection, user should be able to just switch from one provider to the next one => where is the lock in? Maybe it's learning the user's preference and behavior?

- At the moment the AI is damn impressive but at the same time it's easy to confuse the tech; just bounce some emails back and fourth with "Hey let's meet today", "Where?", "At the Ritz, 3pm", "Ok", "hey I have to postpone, will come back to you with a new time", "no problem", "tomorrow is better, same location, same time, but let's meet directly at the restaurant"; semi-automatic systems (i think Clara is) which use human operators to do final checks might deal with such messy conversations but then it's the question about scaling again

- You can't include the bots in messenger conversations (minor)

- Having a real PA is the key to success; the better she knows you the more she will take of your shoulders. The PA very often acts as a proxy for you and sometimes it's wise to use this proxy and sometimes not—depending on the other party and their status. It's perceived as a status symbol and it sends the signal 'this person is very busy', this is in particular true in a hierarchical context like in a corporation where only higher levels have dedicated PAs. It's also common not to approach higher status people (compared to your own status) with your PA. However, having an AI PA feels just cheap, like "Hey, I am busy but I can't afford a real PA", this is the main problem, if you are really important und if you really run a successful business you NEED to have a ded PA, no AI PA will be able to do the job of a real PA; important people have two, three dozen meetings a week and just for scheduling and rescheduling you need a ded PA, less important people have so few meetings a week that they can schedule them themselves; maybe this perception will change in 10 years where AI PAs get better and better and everybody has one but the status issue still stays

Would love to know your opinion? Is this a field to invest?

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.

Small nitpick, but i would lose the first GIF which has about 6 emails scrolling by in quick succession. I'm not a speed-reader, so even managing to make out the grey summaries at the top took me like 6+ iterations. That's pretty frustrating, and i only stuck at it because i'm procrastinating and should actually be doing the dishes, because i should actually be changing a light bulb, because i should actually be rinsing my yak, because i should actually be writing my thesis manuscript. In that order.

EDIT: or at least slow it down, because of course the point it's trying to make is cool and/or worth it and/or noble.