Toki

What Toki is

An assistant for arranging things that acts rather than suggests. It approaches the people involved, finds an hour suiting everybody, shapes the day and decides what deserves the first slot — the work of somebody employed to manage a diary rather than of a calendar application.

What it accepts is the interesting part: a message, a voicemail, a screenshot of a conversation, a forwarded note, or half a request typed badly. Turning those into appointments is the skill being automated, and it is exactly the step that normally needs a human. It runs on the web and both mobile platforms, and plugs into the calendar services people already keep, along with watches and voice assistants.

What you can do with it

Coordination happens by the assistant approaching participants itself, with a booking link available for anybody preferring to choose an hour unaided — both directions of the same problem covered.

It also takes a view on how a day should look rather than only recording what is in it, weighing uninterrupted work against whatever is urgent, and reviewing what is coming daily and weekly so the shape of things can be seen instead of merely lived through. A private record of how you work, plan and like to be reminded accumulates, so arrangements improve rather than being renegotiated each time. Watchers can be set on things worth following — a price, a deadline, a release — and it monitors them, does the reading, and surfaces a result when something changes — work otherwise sitting in somebody's head indefinitely. Reminders step up from a notification to an alarm to an actual telephone call, while clashes produce suggestions for resolving them rather than a warning. Groups are covered too, whether that is a work team, a household or a circle of friends.

Who it is for

People whose days are mostly meetings with other people: directors and managers arranging across several calendars, alongside founders doing it with nobody to delegate to.

Those carrying a great deal to remember form the second audience, while households and social groups get their own use out of the shared coordination.

People who once had somebody human doing this and no longer do are the obvious case, alongside those who never had anybody at all.

What to watch out for

Something that writes to other people so as to arrange a meeting is acting in your name. Whoever receives it should know a machine is writing rather than a person, both because it changes how they reply and because presenting a machine as a person misrepresents it in a professional setting; how it introduces itself ought to be a setting you control.

Accepting voicemail, screenshots and mail means it reads what those contain, and a screenshot of a work conversation can carry much that has nothing to do with scheduling. Keep the permission scope narrow where possible, and remember that the memory feature means whatever it reads is retained in some form. That memory of how somebody works is what makes it useful and is also a detailed model of one person's habits and priorities — where it lives and how it is erased should be answerable from the terms, and nothing about privacy or security appears on the front page at all. Its maker states it withdrew from a major messaging platform because that platform's commercial terms now prohibit standalone assistants operating there, and names another well-known product that left for the same reason: a plausible, checkable explanation, and a reminder that anything built inside somebody else's channel can lose that channel at any moment. No amounts are published despite one line calling it free, and the press citations listed point at articles about a different product name, which indicates the page is not carefully maintained.