Never remind yourself to remind yourself again

Jarvis is one of the first integrated chat bots for Facebook messenger and will handle your reminders for you.

After force feeding the Messenger app on almost all users last year, Facebook now has a platform for developers to create chat bots in Messenger. Announced at the F8 event, the company introduced applications of the technology like contacting a company via chat instead of an 800 number. Zuckerberg demonsrated it by ordering flowers without leaving the messenger application.

Introducing Jarvis

Now the first of the chat bots are hitting the market and Jarvis wants to handle all your reminders for you. I gave Jarvis a little test chat today.

The debits website is minimal to the point of being slightly discomforting. There’s a link to send Jarvis a message that immediately sends you to messenger. Did I just agree to something? I went back to check. Click on “terms” and you see only: “We can do whatever we want with Jarvis.” Well, that’s reassuring. In the name of investigatory journalism I pressed on:

I asked Jarvis to remind me to call my mom in five minutes which he dutifully did. I set a reminder for an hour later and the next day and he (she? it?) confirmed he would remind me. I wondered how chatty the chat bot might be so I tried to start a conversation, with no luck:

Simple functionality

One of the advantages of Jarvis is that you don’t have to get a separate app or interface to use it. Facebook is far from perfect, but it certainly is ubiquitous. The reminders are simple and straightforward as text messages, not messing with calendar integration or anything.

I support this simple functionality, as I am reminded of a time I tried Siri to remind me of a social meet up and accidentally sent a google calendar invite for “drinks with cool hair Cody” to Cool Hair Cody himself, who wasn’t aware how cool I thought his hair was until then.

Also, limited functionality

Disadvantages of Jarvis seem to be it’s limited functionality if you DO want it to talk to your calendar, or your virtual assistants, or anyone but you yourself and the fact that you might be straight up Rumplestiltskin-ing your first born child to them by using it.

#Jarvis