I want Sandy
254 words, 1 image 
I mean who wouldn’t. Look at that cheeky ‘hot secretary’ smile. The saucy bob; the perfectly curled eyelashes, and that pencil behind the ear denoting efficiency. Hubba!
Sandy, at IWantSandy.com is a ‘virtual personal assistant’. Really, ’she’ is a cross between ‘Eliza’ the old and unconvincing AI conversation program, and an online calendar, contact list and general information store. You can create items using a Web interface, but more interestingly, you can create them by sending her emails and instant messages (via Twitter): “remind me to call Dave on Wednesday at 3pm” ; “remember sue’s phone number is 12345″ etc.
Sandy sends you a daily digest of today’s items, plus reminders for individual items, and you can ask her to recall things for you — or just browse them on the Web site.
Lucky Americans can do all this by mobile phone text message, too.
It’s promising. I think there’s some way to go before it’s great. Top of my personal wish list, is something along the lines of “remind me about Dad’s birthday on January 19th, 5 days before”, which can currently be achieved through the Web interface, but not in the convenient chat interface. Community members have all kinds of smart suggestions, my favourite being the idea of Sandy understanding things like airline confirmation emails — so you could forward them to her, and have all the appropriate dates and details filed by Sandy.
She’s a chirpy soul. In one of her first emails to me, she said she wished she could email me a donut. Bless.