Best Unique Productive Personal Assistant Apps

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By Raji Ridwan

Hiring a human personal assistant costs around $15 an hour.  Given the wage of the average employee in the United States, you know there’s got to be an alternative. If we’ll be paying personal assistants 150% of our salaries, how are we even expected to survive?

It turns out that there are cheaper alternatives to hiring a personal assistant and paying a full wage. While personal assistant apps can’t help in specialized fields like banking and law, there’s still a hot market for people who want personal assistant apps without all the complexities.

If you could use some help from a PA app (personal assistance app), here are some of the Top productive personal assistant apps that won’t charge you $15 an hour.

What Is Personal Assistant Apps or Personal Assistant Software?

Personal assistant software or apps refer to any application or program on your phone or computer that’s capable of simulating a personal assistant. Historically, they’re used to make computers more accessible for people who have difficulties using the regular controls on a phone or computer.

Personal assistant software often uses voice control for enhanced accessibility. Also, you can get responses to your voice commands in audio format, making them an easier way to use a device. Over the years, even people without disabilities have embraced personal assistant apps because they’re helpful either way.

The first mainstream instance of an app in this category is Siri, the virtual voice assistant that was included with all iPhones back in 2011. Today, there are better and more robust personal assistant apps that make the market a pretty competitive one.

Over the years, there has been a rise in the number of apps that you can use to hire a personal assistant online. These apps don’t assign the personal assistant job to software; instead, they let you pay someone else to do your tasks for you. For simplicity, we can also refer to these as personal assistant apps.

Assistance Apps for Android

Android has one of the most productive personal assistant apps included by default. In addition to that, there are tons of other apps on the Play Store that serve a similar purpose. Here are some of the most productive apps for Android that serve as capable personal assistant alternatives.

1. Google Assistant

Ever since Apple introduced Siri with iPhone 4S, tech giants have battled themselves in an endless race to create smart personal assistant apps that work with their tech products. From the popular ones like Alexa, Bixby, Siri, and Google Assistant, Google Assistant still seems like the only one that works.

It comes pre-installed on pretty much every Android device made outside of China. Also, it’s impossible to uninstall, so, if you happen not to like it, you have two options: you can either get an iPhone or cry yourself to sleep every night.

However, I don’t think you’ll ever have to try the latter since I’m yet to find anyone who “hates” Google Assistant. While it does blunder sometimes like when it thought Damascus was the world’s oldest city, it’s still pretty smart compared to every other alternative in the market.

In the early days of Google Assistant, the app was more like an app that could speak and answer questions. As time progressed, however, Google integrated more features that made it more of a proper personal assistant. Today, Google Assistant is smart enough to be threatening your job security if you are a professional personal assistant.

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With features that let you find your phone, set up an alarm, and get personalized news and weather forecasts, Google Assistant is objectively one of the best personal assistant apps. Wait until you see the agenda and routines feature that tells you when your next appointment is.

If anything is possible within a personal assistant app, it’s likely possible within Google Assistant. Also, there are so many features on the app that if you’re learning at the speed of one new feature per day, it would take years to truly master its capabilities.

Fun fact: Google Assistant can help you remember stuff like a regular personal assistant, only that it’s better at it.

2. GetStuff

While Google Assistant can do quite a lot these days, you have to admit that hiring a real human is sometimes necessary. Stuff doesn’t work like most other personal assistant apps on the Play Store or App Store, but it’s the only app that can cater to the needs of professionals from a specific field.

You can ask Google Assistant to turn off the lights, remember your Wi-Fi password, or tell you what’s next on your agenda, but it isn’t quite at the stage where it can do your taxes or complete your research paper; for those, you’ll need real humans.

However, the process of hiring human personal assistants is both complicated and expensive. Stuff thinks that shouldn’t be the case, and they created a platform for hiring human personal assistants without worrying about adding a new employee to your payroll.

Instead of paying $15 an hour to your new personal assistant, you only pay a flat rate of $50 monthly, which gets you unlimited tasks. Also, you don’t have to worry about assigning tasks to your assistant, since you don’t get any in the first place.

Rather, you post a job of Stuff, the app finds a person to get it done, and everything gets completed before you even need it; how cool is that?

As good as this app sounds, it has its downsides. Since it doesn’t assign a physician assistant, you can’t use it for basic stuff like turning the lights on or off, controlling smart home appliances, or remembering complicated things.

However, you can use it to find services nearest to you, schedule appointments with dentists and doctors, or plan a trip. Upon deeper analysis, you’ll find out that Stuff isn’t an alternative to Google Assistant; both can work together for your best interest.

3. 24me

24me mightn’t be as intelligent as Google Assistant or Siri, but it isn’t trying to be. There is the default, insanely intelligent, feature-rich default AI voice assistant on every new device, but what if you only wanted something simpler?

24me doesn’t do a lot of things, but in the few it does, it does them well. As the name on the listing on Google Play and App Store indicates, it’s a calendar app, a notes app, a reminder app, and a to-do list app all bundled to make one of the best personal assistant apps.

The app isn’t just a personal assistant app, it’s also a task management app that connects with most of the other apps you use in your daily workflow. It has an incredibly bright interface with many colors that don’t give it the overly serious user interface of similar task management or personal assistant apps.

When you start using 24me, it asks for access to a lot of the other services you use, down to your credit card and Facebook account. While you don’t have to grant access to every one of its requests, letting the app access more services is always better since that makes it serve you better.

If you’re someone who frequently gets into trouble for forgetting the birthdays of loved ones, try 24me (and integrate your Facebook account, of course). You can also have the app remind you of your upcoming bills by linking your credit card.

For tasks that are difficult or even impossible for a virtual assistant, you can connect 24me to TaskRabbit to get someone to do it for you for a fee. If you’re looking for an app to replace your secretary, this feature makes 24me one of the strongest contenders.

productive personal assistant apps

As long as you don’t ask 24me to tell you the name of the president of Eritrea or the 18th president of the United States, it should work just fine. If you need a smart personal assistant that knows it all, Google Assistant and Siri are always available to help.

Best Assistance Apps for iPhone

Android is not the only mainstream operating system for mobile, and it’s certainly not the only one with PA apps. You can also get a fine selection of apps in this category on an iPhone, including the first virtual assistant app that happens to be an iOS exclusive. With that said, here are some productive personal assistant apps for iPhones.

4. Siri

If you have an iPhone, Siri would be an interesting alternative to Google Assistant. While Siri still trails Google’s solution in the personal assistant apps space, it’s good enough to be your assistant if you don’t have any need to get any serious work done.

If your workflow revolves around products from Apple, there’s no better personal assistant app for you than Siri. It’s available on iPhones, Macs, and iPads, and you’ll have the same assistant across all of your devices as long as you keep them updated.

Imagine telling your phone to remind you of your 10 o’clock appointment and having your laptop read out the remainder. Thankfully, you don’t have to imagine it; you can experience it by using Siri on your iPhone and your Mac simultaneously.

If you’re seriously exploring the possibility of using Siri as your primary personal assistant system, you must have read a lot about how it’s dumber than Google Assistant. News flash; there’s hardly anything you can do on Google Assistant that’s impossible on Siri.

On the flip side, there are several tasks you can perform on Siri that are simply impossible on Google Assistant. You can get a fully working version of Siri on your desktop if you use a Mac; I’d love to know when that becomes available with Google Assistant.

However, it’s only honest to admit Siri has a lot of work to do to catch up with Google Assistant, especially when it comes to tasks relating to personal assistant apps. For example, Google Assistant seems to be the personal assistant that’s best at understanding context, and that makes a huge difference to how the personal assistant apps work.

5. ChatterBoss

If you incline more toward an app like Stuff, ChatterBoss is the closest thing you can get to. It doesn’t utilize any AI virtual assistants, rather, all tasks are assigned to remote human personal assistants that will get the work done as soon as you need it.

While Stuff is also okay for entrepreneurs, ChatterBoss is a superior alternative for professional use cases. The $399 onboarding fee shows that it’s not a platform to hire random people to pick up your groceries at the supermarket.

ChatterBoss is by no means a cheaper alternative to a human personal assistant. It’s just an easier way to get one without having to find people with a specific skill set. Since the app will automatically pair you with a remote assistant, you don’t even need to conduct an interview or anything of that sort.

Also, unlike Stuff, you get a dedicated executive assistant that charges you per hour. ChatterBoss will recommend the best assistants for you based on your answers to a questionnaire that every new member is made to answer before using the app.

However, don’t let the overly executive feel of the ChatterBoss fool you into thinking you can’t get personal work done using the app. Some of the personal services that the app says you can carry out include personal shopping, budgeting, event planning, gift buying, traveling and appointment booking, etc.

But if you’re paying 400 bucks only to find a personal assistant to get you restaurant recommendations, you’re doing it wrong. With a “Hey Google, show me the nearest restaurants,” I’ll match the productivity of your $400 assistant in seconds with probably better restaurant options than you have.

Conclusion

We have truly come a long way with technology. Just a couple of years ago, we thought phones playing music was the best thing since sliced bread. Fast forward to a few years later and personal assistant apps on our phones are slowly making human personal assistants obsolete.

If you want to increase your productivity with personal assistant apps, here are some of the best suggestions for 2022. It doesn’t matter what you want a personal assistant for, you should find an app in this list that works.

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