Introducing Talla the Task Assistant: A Natural Language To-Do List Manager
Last September we started Talla on this premise: that the rise of A.I. and conversational interfaces creates a unique inflection point to build something that didn’t currently exist — an intelligent assistant that can tap into a corporate knowledge graph to perform all sorts of interesting tasks. It is a really big vision about changing the flow of work, and will take some time. But we don’t believe in doing multi-year venture funded research projects. We believe you learn best by launching things, even if they are only small pieces of what we are building. So today I want to make our first announcement of something we are releasing at Talla.
What we are launching today is a Slack-based agent we call Talla Task Assistant. This Talla can manage a task list for an individual or group. What is unique is that it does so without slash commands, and instead has full natural language support. In another two weeks, it will have the ability to answer questions about the task list itself. So, for example, you will be able to say “Talla, how many tasks did I complete last month?” or “How many tasks were on my to-do list for more than 3 days?”
The core technology is cool. But, what is even more important, is where Talla is going.
Today, people accomplish work by adding things to their task lists and going back later, when they have time, to do the tasks. But imagine a world where you add a task to the task list and someone else (an intelligent assistant) takes the task off the list and executes it. Give us a bit more time and Talla will become a task list that does some of the tasks for you when you add them to the list. And it will be a task list that is smart enough to proactively add important things to your list that you may not have thought of. What is a task list manager today will be a task doer (for some types of tasks) soon.
What kinds of tasks will Talla do? Well, today we can demonstrate things like scheduling an interview, onboarding a new employee, or answering basic questions about documents. Our goal over the next couple of years is to take the monotonous, boring, automated tasks off of your plate and allow you to focus on the work you love — the more creative, strategic work that puts you in that desirable state of “flow.”
If you want to try out Talla, you can add it directly to your team’s Slack account here.
For those of you who have been supportive and patient beta testers, we just want to say thank you for all your help getting to this point. We appreciate your commitment to our shared vision, and are excited to deliver even more cool functionality to you in the coming months.
A note about privacy and security — My last company was Backupify. We copied, backed up, and stored the entire email and document archives of Fortune 500 companies. We took privacy and security very seriously, and I still do the same at Talla. If you have specific questions about data issues, please contact us.
