Any.do takes on Todoist's productivity smarts with AI-powered Assistant

Any.do is back for another round of productiveness.

Any.do has been around since the HTC Evo 4G was the best phone you could buy. I'll just let that sink in for a second.

The productivity app has long been known for its attractive yet spare interface, gesture-friendly controls and extensive feature set, but in recent years has been surpassed by Todoist, Wunderlist and a host of competitors in one main area: context-based assistance.

Today, that changes with Any.do 4.0, which brings an AI-powered Assistant — basically a bot — that plugs into a number of external services to help you get stuff done.

After analyzing over a billion anonymized tasks captured by Any.do, we built a new type of assistant that can actually accomplish your tasks for you. Any.do Assistant automatically scans your list and selectively marks the tasks it can get done for you in the real world, then offers ways to do them.

Like Facebook's M, which is not widely available outside a few U.S. cities, Any.do Assistant uses a "a combination of smart AIs and smart supervising humans, so you know that even a difficult and nuanced task - like finding your mom the right bracelet for her birthday - will be done right." That's why, for now, it is only available in the U.S., too — and, for now, only on iOS, with Android coming soon.

Other features in Any.do 4.0 are more universal: the company has integrated its once-independent Cal calendar app into the core experience, so users can coordinate due dates with particular tasks. There's also a new "lightning-fast" real-time sync, which delivers instant updates across iOS and Android.

Back to the Assistant, Any.do says that it charges a "reasonable" 5-15% service fee for a connected service. It will be interesting to see whether it will gain traction.

It's taken a while, but Any.do finally feels like it is the product it was always meant to be, built on a foundation of simplicity, beauty and, now, intelligence.

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