I just gave Martin a go. What I'm looking for is an AI PA that can:
- do some research on a given company/individual/website and give me a summary.
- preferably also identify a contact email.
- handle selecting a good time for meetings according to my availability and preferences.
- handle the communication with the other party.
- let me know when it is arranged, or if it's given up.
I signed up and gave it a UK phone number, and got a UK number back for texting Martin. I'm not sure why it has to be SMS when it could be an in-app chat. I was expecting to get a confirmation SMS or similar, but it just accepted it straight away. When I texted the number I was given (several times), it was delivered but there was no reply.
Martin sent me an email welcoming me. I replied asking it to set up a meeting for early next week with another email address. Martin replied saying it is unable to email people on my behalf, and suggested I set it up myself.
> Unfortunately, I am currently unable to send emails to other people on your behalf. However, you can easily send an email to ** to schedule the meeting for early next week in the afternoon.
I reminded Martin that there is an example on the website homepage of doing just that, and it replied saying it can indeed schedule meetings, and asked for the details again. I replied with the same details, and it confirmed the meeting was set up.
I checked my other email, and there was no message setting anything up. I told Martin that the other party needs to know about the email, and it replied with:
> Understood. I'll make sure to inform ** about the meeting details.
Still nothing received. Furthermore, I checked the app and I haven't even connected my calendar, so I'm surprised it didn't warn me or prompt me to do this when I asked for a meeting.
I gave up with that and decided to try something else. I forwarded Martin an email thread from a lead, which included a lot of back story on their organization, offering, and some areas that they think we could potentially collaborate on. I asked Martin to find out more about the company, and evaluate the options for collaboration.
This lead is in the AI space, with their primary product being a document digitisation solution to help surface and discover business documents.
Martin replied describing it as a "nearbound revenue platform to streamline revenue operations", with a key feature being "Automated lead scoring and distribution to prioritize high potential leads". As far as evaluating the collaboration opportunities, it instead gave me a list of collaboration features within the platform, none of which exist.
At the end, it linked to a blog post to their recent funding round. Except, the blog post was from a completely unrelated company with a similar name. Bear in mind that the originally forwarded email was from their business email account, and the body contained multiple links and references to their website.
I decided to try one more test, and asked it to do some research on my own business website and let me know what it finds out. It's been 20 minutes, and I haven't had a reply. I checked the app to see if there was any indication it's working on something for me, but nothing their either.
I love the idea of Martin, but I'll be canceling my trial - it just doesn't seem anywhere near ready yet - especially given I have to trust it to communicate on my behalf.
Thank you for all the feedback! Just wanted to hop on and address a few things.
- I totally resonate with your criteria for an AI PA - this is very much what we're working towards with our email integration. We had been focused on voice for a while, but recently started tackling all the email use cases. Really want to get these right for you!
- Sorry for the poor onboarding job - we should make it more clear that you have to sync your calendar before we send you an email inviting you to send and forward scheduling items to Martin.
- For sending emails to contacts, this is one of our upcoming integrations that we've been building for a while - but just not ready yet! We want to make it able to send/reply to emails and fully act on threads that you attach it to. This means issuing you a unique email address for "your Martin" and managing it's behavior on threads and memory of other contacts. It's a harder problem than we first anticipated, so we're working through it steadily! It should be ready in the next month or so. For now, the communications feature is just limited to texting contacts on your behalf.
- For "deep searches", it definitely isn't the greatest at digging into a topic or generating a thorough briefing for you right now. We're not sure how deep we'll go into this use case in the future, but we do plan on integrating with more specialized functions, like LinkedIn, Twitter, Maps, etc. which should make this a lot better.
Sorry again for the poor onboarding experience. I think we also got an email from you, so will reply there as well to ask for more feedback!
“It definitely isnt the greatest at digging into a topic”
I think this is the greatest drawback to using a tool like this. It does good with the low hanging fruit tasks like responding to a txt. But it does poorly at a loooong range of long tail tasks like conpany research, or summarizing a topic or gathering the latest headlines for a topic, or finding leads or alerting me when someone mentions my brand on Twitter or when someone links to my blog post.
And when soneone tries to do any of those things and gets a bad user experience, theyll give up on your tool
That is what valuable customer feedback looks like. I won't be surprised if Apple uses your feedback for their upcoming Siri. Unfortunately based on this and other feedback here it looks like Martin had a very late launch. Hope this turns into a proper product because we do need a Siri competitor.
for what you're after, my app howie.ai would work well. we don't do nearly as much as Martin does, instead we're narrowly focused on getting the scheduling use case right. i'm [email protected] if you want to try it out!
- do some research on a given company/individual/website and give me a summary.
- preferably also identify a contact email.
- handle selecting a good time for meetings according to my availability and preferences.
- handle the communication with the other party.
- let me know when it is arranged, or if it's given up.
I signed up and gave it a UK phone number, and got a UK number back for texting Martin. I'm not sure why it has to be SMS when it could be an in-app chat. I was expecting to get a confirmation SMS or similar, but it just accepted it straight away. When I texted the number I was given (several times), it was delivered but there was no reply.
Martin sent me an email welcoming me. I replied asking it to set up a meeting for early next week with another email address. Martin replied saying it is unable to email people on my behalf, and suggested I set it up myself.
> Unfortunately, I am currently unable to send emails to other people on your behalf. However, you can easily send an email to ** to schedule the meeting for early next week in the afternoon.
I reminded Martin that there is an example on the website homepage of doing just that, and it replied saying it can indeed schedule meetings, and asked for the details again. I replied with the same details, and it confirmed the meeting was set up.
I checked my other email, and there was no message setting anything up. I told Martin that the other party needs to know about the email, and it replied with:
> Understood. I'll make sure to inform ** about the meeting details.
Still nothing received. Furthermore, I checked the app and I haven't even connected my calendar, so I'm surprised it didn't warn me or prompt me to do this when I asked for a meeting.
I gave up with that and decided to try something else. I forwarded Martin an email thread from a lead, which included a lot of back story on their organization, offering, and some areas that they think we could potentially collaborate on. I asked Martin to find out more about the company, and evaluate the options for collaboration.
This lead is in the AI space, with their primary product being a document digitisation solution to help surface and discover business documents.
Martin replied describing it as a "nearbound revenue platform to streamline revenue operations", with a key feature being "Automated lead scoring and distribution to prioritize high potential leads". As far as evaluating the collaboration opportunities, it instead gave me a list of collaboration features within the platform, none of which exist.
At the end, it linked to a blog post to their recent funding round. Except, the blog post was from a completely unrelated company with a similar name. Bear in mind that the originally forwarded email was from their business email account, and the body contained multiple links and references to their website.
I decided to try one more test, and asked it to do some research on my own business website and let me know what it finds out. It's been 20 minutes, and I haven't had a reply. I checked the app to see if there was any indication it's working on something for me, but nothing their either.
I love the idea of Martin, but I'll be canceling my trial - it just doesn't seem anywhere near ready yet - especially given I have to trust it to communicate on my behalf.