The makers of popular task app Any.do have announced a few new features coming to the platform, including a new artificial intelligence assistant that is supposed to make it easier to accomplish some tasks straight through the app.

“The Any.do Assistant is new way to think about productivity: making sure things get done, whether you do them yourself or someone does them for you,” the Any.do team said in a blog post. “By putting an assistant that combines smart AI and clever humans right into your to-do list, we make a more personal and useful experience.”

According to Any.do, it built its AI system by analyzing billions of anonymized user tasks to get a grasp for exactly how people use the app and what sorts of tasks they are trying to accomplish. The result, the company says, is an assistant that not only makes it easier to get things done, but one that can also complete some of those tasks on its own without you having to lift a finger.

Image courtesy of Any.do

The Assistant works by scanning through saved tasks and picking out the ones that it could reasonably accomplish on its own. The example Any.do used in its blog post is buying flowers for your mother’s birthday, and the AI assistant asked for some basic parameters — budget, occasion and so on — and the assistant returned relevant results that fit those requirements, along with links to easily buy them.

Any.do noted that its assistant is supervised by real people, and while the team did not go into detail about what role these supervisors play, they said that there are a few advantages to this type of system.

“The Assistant is powered by a combination of smart AIs and smart supervising humans, so you know that even a difficult and nuanced task – like finding your mom the right bracelet for her birthday – will be done right,” the Any.do team said. “Fully automated solutions like Cortana or Siri can’t do that. The Any.do Assistant can tackle holidays gift-giving, housecleaning, groceries, laundry, and many more of your pending tasks. Unlike human-only assistant services, the Any.do Assistant is deeply integrated to your everyday to do list and calendar.”

Any.do Assistant is not a free service. Instead, users must pay between a 5 to 15 percent service fee based on the item or service that the AI procured. The new AI is currently available for beta testing iOS, and an Android version will be arriving sometime in the near future.

New calendar and faster sync

While the AI assistant is certainly the most interesting feature arriving in Any.do’s latest update, there are also a few other features coming to the platform this week. This includes a new calendar view that is aimed at making it easier to see what tasks or events you have coming up. The Any.do calendar is capable of syncing up with your own calendar on your mobile device, allowing you to schedule items to both simultaneously.

Any.do is also beefing up its sync feature, which allows you to access your saved tasks across multiple devices. The app makers say that they have completely rebuilt their backend architecture to significantly speed up the sync feature, which now occurs in real time as tasks are added.

Photo by nikkibuitendijk