This is part 1 of Quickstart Guide: How to boost your personal productivity with A.I. tools

Human’s ability to focus deeply is believed to be a major competitive advantage nowadays. But nothing kills the flow easier than fear of missing an event that requires an immediate action. Solution? Set up a system that would warn you in case of such event, and get that out of your mind. Here are a few scenarios.

… something unexpected is happening at home

There is no place like home, and there is nothing more important than to know that your home is safe while you are away. Motion detection of a typical home security camera might relieve you of the responsibility of monitoring it, but the amount of alerts it generates quickly trains us to ignore them, which kinda defeats the purpose. Wouldn’t it be great if the camera could tell apart tree shadow moving across the window from a person moving across a room? Or Daisy making her way to the bowl?

Besides, there is much more to the normal flow of life at home than absence of intruders. Kids are not home from school at the usual time? Daisy is still waiting for her walker? Your mom is not at the kitchen for the usual morning cup of tea? I bet you’d want to be warned about any of these.

And that’s exactly what A.I. camera Lighthouse does. That, and telling you who broke the vase.

Bonus: Yes, you can just talk to the camera to set up the alerts – no endless cryptic “settings”.

… kid wanders away on the way from school

Speaking of kids – knowing that they are late from school might be a bit too late in the game (the game of keeping them safe – safe mainly from peer pressure). In case you want to keep an eye on their movement on busy city streets, there is a number of apps that allow you to see their location on a map (that always makes me think of the Marauder’s Map).

But our goal is to get warned when something goes off tracks, and for that I find GeoLoc particularly suitable. It allows you do define safety zones (or safety corridors, say, from school to home) and get an alert when a family member leaves a safety zone. Where is the A.I., bro, you might ask. Well, the plague of such systems is GPS dead zones – areas where GPS signal is not available (subway, for example) and where the majority of false alerts is generated. GeoLoc’s “hybrid self-learning” system minimizes these false alerts.

Bonus: It warns you about low battery voltage of your family members cell phones, mitigating risk of accidental (and non-accidental) tracking outages.

Still, A.I. can do more to help with children monitoring – and it does in the case of smart wearable geo-trackers Jiobit. The company uses machine learning to analyze daily routes of the kids wearing the device and free parents from manually setting “fences” for alerts.

Bonus: Unlike smartphone, this dedicated wearable tracking device lasts for up to a week on single charge, and works for pets as well.

… my upcoming trip is in danger

Even the best of us suffer from travel anxiety. Using checklists like “packing baggage (beach edition)” and “leaving home for a week+” can help focus your racing mind and minimize the risk of having nightmares while on vacation. But there are critical components of the traveling experience that are outside of your control, like missing connecting flight – or even missing direct flight because of unusually long security check lines. Getting a heads-up on these could be a huge time- and money-saver.

Instalocate is designed exactly for that, and it doesn’t even ask you to install yet another app (’cause why install app that you use only every other month, right?). Just send your flight number to their Messanger bot to get the current status – and alerts on any changes.

Bonus: In case the flight delay is outrageous, and you’re eligible for a compensation from the airline, Instalocate makes filing the claim a matter of a few taps. Check and see if any of the delays you experienced recently qualify.

Let’s proceed to learning how to get reminded by A.I. that… →