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In a world full of AI assistants and tools that try to make your life easier, Poppy takes a different approach. Rather than requiring your effort up front, Poppy does its best to be proactive – and give you helpful context before you even know you need it.
Highlights
Poppy isn’t a traditional chatbot interface. Instead, you link up all of the things you’d like it to understand about you, such as your email, calendar, location, reminders, health data, and more. Then, in the background, it learns about you, gathers key details, and contextually tries to suggest things to you. That can be via text, a notification, the apps interface, or a widget.
Personally, one of the things I found most helpful was when it alerted me to a flight I had in two weeks. I often don’t find myself thinking much about my travel until just before I’m about to go, but Poppy suggested an itinerary for the trip, giving me ideas on what I should do if I find some spare time. That was nice.
Another neat feature is its location awareness. Once, I was out late at night, and it suggested a restaurant nearby that I should go and eat at. I don’t often find myself opening up Apple Maps to find things unless I have no clue what’s in an area, but I will say, I had no idea that restaurant was there and I certainly wouldn’t have gone to look at a map, so Poppy’s suggestion there was appreciated.
You can also set up smart reminders, where Poppy can reach out to you about things only if certain conditions are met. For example, if the weather is suddenly colder, you should grab a jacket.
Why Poppy?
Poppy exists as a means to sift through all of the chaos on your phone. In today’s landscape, just checking your email for a quick detail can often result in you getting sidetracked by multiple things, losing sight of the original goal. That’s what Poppy aims to fix. Instead of having to go and find things, Poppy should find them for you. From Poppy founder Sai Kambampati:
The original iPhone was sold as a tool that worked the way you do. Somewhere along the way, that flipped, and now we spend our days parsing notifications, hunting through apps, managing the device that was supposed to manage us. Poppy is our attempt to restore calmer computing to consumers. We built it natively for iPhone, using AI not as a feature to show off, but as something that runs quietly in the background. It can understand how people actually live, work, and move through their day. The iPhone is still the most personal device any of us own. Poppy is our attempt to help it act like it again.
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