Make iMessage your AI executive assistant

Make iMessage Your AI Executive Assistant with Lindy

Many individuals desire an AI assistant that integrates seamlessly with iMessage, prioritizing security and focused functionality over an "everything machine" 0:03. Lindy AI Assistant aims to fulfill this need, offering an executive assistant powered by AI that is proactive and efficient. This AI can reach out to people, assist with sales, draft emails in your tone, manage calendars, and more 0:18.

The product is presented as a potential "OpenClaw killer" when it comes to executive assistant functionalities 0:31. This article provides a comprehensive breakdown of how to use Lindy, why to use it, and its unique advantages.

Setting Up Your AI Executive Assistant

Lindy AI Assistant is designed for quick and easy setup. Users can set up their own AI executive assistant in just two minutes 1:17. The process involves two simple steps: providing your phone number and connecting your Google account 5:31.

Lindy comes out of the box with an opinionated design, meaning it's not a blank slate where you have to configure every workflow 2:42. It proactively learns about you and connects to your existing tools to start taking work off your plate immediately 1:19.

Key Features and Daily Usage

Lindy lives on iMessage and integrates with various applications such as email, calendar, Notion, and Google Docs 2:02. It proactively observes your activities and identifies opportunities to save you time 2:17.

Proactive Assistance

• Morning Brief: Lindy provides a daily brief, including local weather, scheduled meetings, and an email triage summary. For instance, it can report triaging 63 emails overnight and drafting four replies 3:03. This feature significantly reduces the need to open Gmail frequently.
• Calendar Management: Lindy actively checks your calendar and takes action. An example given is Lindy notifying a user that a dinner reservation was at a restaurant closed on Tuesdays and suggesting an alternative nearby, then moving the invite and informing attendees 3:30. It can also accept meeting requests if your calendar is free 3:37.
• Meeting Prep: Before meetings, Lindy provides a brief on who you're meeting with and context from past interactions, such as previous meeting topics or client needs 5:05.
• Email Handling: Beyond drafting replies, Lindy can identify important emails, like invoices, and cross-reference details such as billing addresses against your known information, asking for confirmation if discrepancies are found 10:05.

Human-like Interaction and Learning

Lindy is designed to communicate with a very human-like tone, using lowercase, specific phrasing, and even cracking jokes or expressing mild expletives to reflect a natural conversation 3:48. This attention to tone is a deliberate effort to make interactions feel more natural and less robotic.

Lindy learns by ingesting information from your inbox, Slack, Google Drive, and other connected tools, loading it into its memory 5:43. This allows it to surprise users with how much it knows about their business and relationships. It continues to learn by reading emails and attending meetings 6:05.

Querying and Integrations

Lindy acts as a "second brain," allowing you to query anything it has seen or heard 6:27. For example, you can ask it to remind you what a company does or how many people are on a sales team, and it will retrieve the information from past interactions 7:02.

It integrates with hundreds of applications, including Slack, Notion, Google Docs, HubSpot, Salesforce, and Twilio 8:25. If an integration isn't readily available, you can create an API key and instruct Lindy to use it directly 24:32.

Advanced Capabilities

• Actionable Insights from Meetings: During meetings, you can instruct Lindy to take specific actions, such as sending a Slack message to a teammate with an important update 7:22 or creating and sharing a Google Doc with relevant information 8:04.
• CRM Updates: Users can instruct Lindy to update their CRM after meetings. After being told which CRM is used (e.g., HubSpot, Salesforce), Lindy provides a link to connect it 9:36.
• Podcast Summaries: By sending a screenshot of a podcast, Lindy can go online, find the podcast, locate its transcript (integrating with Appify for YouTube transcripts), and send a summary 11:04.
• Research: Lindy performs both proactive research (e.g., preparing a brief on a meeting attendee before a call) and on-demand research from public sources or private data like meeting transcripts, Google Drive, and Notion 13:48.
• Voice Commands: Utilizing iOS shortcuts, users can record voice memos and send them to Lindy, which will process the request. For example, asking about a team's base location from a past meeting 14:42. This integrates with the broader Apple ecosystem, allowing voice commands from devices like a car 15:44.

Lindy vs. Other AI Products

Lindy is positioned differently from other AI products like OpenClaw or Claude.

Lindy vs. OpenClaw

• OpenClaw Pros: More powerful and versatile, with the ability for the agent to access and modify its own code, making it highly adaptable 16:22.
• Lindy Pros:
  • Security: Lindy's runtime is designed for greater security, with the agent operating on a computer separate from itself, preventing it from altering its own code 16:53. Lindy has years of development focused on addressing security issues that newer products might still be encountering 17:10.
  • Ease of Use: Lindy is significantly easier to use and works "out of the box" 17:26. It's compared to Mac OS, which just works, versus Linux, which might require users to spend time on setup and configuration 17:30.

Lindy vs. Claude (and other horizontal AI)

• Claude/Horizontal AI: These products are often built for developers and power users, offering broad capabilities but requiring extensive setup and optimization from the user 18:20. They are more like Android in their versatility and need for technical proficiency 19:09.
• Lindy: Lindy is specifically built for the "chief everything officer" or overwhelmed business owner who needs help managing meetings, emails, and strategic priorities 18:27. It is opinionated, focusing on a few tasks and doing them exceptionally well, like an executive assistant 20:33.

Future Vision and Specialization

The long-term vision for Lindy involves expanding into other specialized job roles, such as social media managers, front-end engineers, or salespeople, by offering distinct AI assistants for each 21:17. Lindy is already showing organic emergence of such behaviors, like proactively offering to help find a new support person and drafting outreach 22:17.

However, the team is deliberately maintaining a focus on the executive assistant role, catering to users who want a tool that simply works and saves time on day one, without requiring them to become AI tinkerers 22:46. This approach mirrors the evolution of personal computers, which started with enthusiasts and later became accessible tools for the general public 23:01.

While Lindy has the capability for tasks like "vibe coding" (writing code), it's not its primary strength, and specialized AI tools are better suited for such deep technical work 25:05. Lindy excels at the 80% of executive assistant tasks, often performing them better than a human due to 24/7 availability, 30-second response times, and the ability for users to be more direct with requests 26:25.

Pricing and Power User Cases

Lindy AI Assistant starts at $49 per month 26:55, which is sufficient for over 90% of users. For "power users" or "whales" who heavily utilize the service, there are higher tiers.

Examples of power user cases include:

• Using Lindy for "vibe coding" 27:20.
• Instructing Lindy to wake up every 15 minutes and use its computer to check for dropped reservations at popular restaurants, then automatically grabbing them 27:41.

Enhanced Voice Capabilities and Collaboration

Lindy already supports voice interactions, allowing users to send voice memos via iMessage and receive voice memo replies 28:08. Upcoming features include full phone call capabilities, where users can call Lindy, and Lindy can call others 28:18. This allows for dynamic conversations where Lindy, having access to all meetings and emails, can offer opinions and insights on strategic priorities or team dynamics 28:44.

For users with human executive assistants, a common approach is to give their human assistant access to Lindy 30:10. A new feature in development is group chats, where Lindy can participate alongside a human assistant, silently logging requests, tracking completion, and performing background tasks 30:27. This allows for seamless collaboration between human and AI assistants.

To learn more about Lindy, visit the link provided in the show notes.