Espa is an AI executive assistant that helps you get things done. Espa schedules your meetings, helps you follow through on tasks, and organizes your email. You can text Espa (or send a voice memo) to book meetings, set reminders, and handle the back-and-forth in group threads. Draft replies that sound just like you, and organize all of your events & to-dos in one place. Espa protects your data with bank-grade encryption, and does not retain or train LLM models on your personal data.
I'm not the most organized person. Never have been. My friends will tell you. My wife will tell you. Anyone who sat next to me in class at Waterloo will tell you.
Yet, I've built things I'm incredibly proud of. I founded and scaled Forethought, an agentic AI customer service company from 0 to $100M+ raised, 1 billion monthly interactions, and a successful acquisition.
In building and scaling a company, I realized that the most successful builders and executives often have really strong teams they can rely on. And if truly agentic AI could work so well for companies, then could it work just as well for individual humans?
So I built Espa to democratize the idea of executive support and scale it to billions. Espa has a phone number and email just like an AI teammate. It's integrated with your Google or Outlook, so it can help you scheduling meetings, manage your inbox, and tackle your todos twice as fast.
And most importantly, it's built with a privacy-first design so you can trust Espa with your work and life. Espa doesn't retain your email or calendar data or train models on it, so your data truly belongs to you. And we have a cool way of doing "memories" and personalization, so ultimately anything Espa learns about you is saved in a doc that you have full read, edit, and delete control over.
I'm actually really really proud of our (small-but-mighty) team for building this. And hope you all will love it!
Around to answer any questions!
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AI executive assistants are only useful if the friction of getting tasks in is lower than doing it yourself. How does Espa handle quick captures on mobile? That's usually the bottleneck — building something in this space too and it's the hardest problem to solve
@soygus Totally agree. "ambient capture" or "quick capture" is actually so hard because it's really hard to remember when to use the AI if it's not already top of mind! TLDR: Voice memos = 🐐.
What we do is enable you to text (iMessage, regular SMS, or WhatsApp) or voice memo Espa anything that's on your mind (there is NO mobile app right now, by design!). A lot of our users send voice memos to Espa anytime they remember something (like "Espa remind me to pickup groceries when I get home"), or when they want to do a task.
I was at a dinner the other day, met someone who wanted an introduction to another person in my network, and i just voice memo'd: "Espa, please draft an email to introduce Satish and Robbie". It knew my context on who was the first person and the second person, drafted an email with my tone, and then i asked it to send. Took less than 2 minutes and I could continue on with my IRL conversation in between!
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@dojiboy9 That's a really clever approach — removing the app entirely and using iMessage/WhatsApp as the interface is frictionless by design. The voice memo use case you described is exactly the pattern we see too. In Toodi we went the opposite direction: one dedicated field where you speak or type anything and AI classifies it automatically into tasks, lists, events, polls or reminders. Different bets on the same problem — curious to see which mental model users prefer long term. Thanks for the detailed response!
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honestly the email integration is what makes or breaks this. if it can actually draft replies in my voice without me editing them it saves the most annoying part of my day
@novamaker01 Yessir! Actually yeah that was one of the first things we wanted to nail! It learns your voice and tone within minutes and reads it back to you during onboarding (kinda magic!). so that when it writes emails, it sounds JUST like you.
Please feel free to give it a go! And let me know what you think? I’m curious! + hope you’ll be delighted by this!
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The least organized guy at Waterloo building the most organized AI assistant, love it.
Seriously though, the cross-app chaining between Gmail and Calendar in one voice memo is exactly where Siri and Gemini still fumble. That's the real unlock here.
Speaking of Gemini, they're pushing hard into this same territory natively on Android. How are you thinking about that moat long term?
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Searching email via text is the big get for me with Espa. I was a beta user and can’t tell you how many times I saved myself from mining through 30+ email chains just to find a single detail; Espa just texts the info you want straight back to you. Removes a ton of friction in ways I was very happy to discover
@akadooley Plus one! I totally agree. I've even done "Hey Espa, find me anything in my inbox that looks like a charitable receipt for taxes" 🫣
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The editable memory doc is the detail that actually matters for trust because i think most AI assistants learn about you in a black box you can't inspect or correct. How does Espa handles scheduling conflicts when two people's assistants are negotiating a meeting time with each other?
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The gap between "AI that drafts replies" and "AI that actually owns scheduling context across tools" is massive. What does Espa do when two calendar invites conflict and both are marked high priority — does it escalate to the user or make a call autonomously?
Espa
AI executive assistants are only useful if the friction of getting tasks in is lower than doing it yourself. How does Espa handle quick captures on mobile? That's usually the bottleneck — building something in this space too and it's the hardest problem to solve
Espa
@soygus Totally agree. "ambient capture" or "quick capture" is actually so hard because it's really hard to remember when to use the AI if it's not already top of mind! TLDR: Voice memos = 🐐.
What we do is enable you to text (iMessage, regular SMS, or WhatsApp) or voice memo Espa anything that's on your mind (there is NO mobile app right now, by design!). A lot of our users send voice memos to Espa anytime they remember something (like "Espa remind me to pickup groceries when I get home"), or when they want to do a task.
I was at a dinner the other day, met someone who wanted an introduction to another person in my network, and i just voice memo'd: "Espa, please draft an email to introduce Satish and Robbie". It knew my context on who was the first person and the second person, drafted an email with my tone, and then i asked it to send. Took less than 2 minutes and I could continue on with my IRL conversation in between!
@dojiboy9 That's a really clever approach — removing the app entirely and using iMessage/WhatsApp as the interface is frictionless by design. The voice memo use case you described is exactly the pattern we see too. In Toodi we went the opposite direction: one dedicated field where you speak or type anything and AI classifies it automatically into tasks, lists, events, polls or reminders. Different bets on the same problem — curious to see which mental model users prefer long term. Thanks for the detailed response!
honestly the email integration is what makes or breaks this. if it can actually draft replies in my voice without me editing them it saves the most annoying part of my day
Espa
@novamaker01 Yessir! Actually yeah that was one of the first things we wanted to nail! It learns your voice and tone within minutes and reads it back to you during onboarding (kinda magic!). so that when it writes emails, it sounds JUST like you.
Please feel free to give it a go! And let me know what you think? I’m curious! + hope you’ll be delighted by this!
The least organized guy at Waterloo building the most organized AI assistant, love it.
Seriously though, the cross-app chaining between Gmail and Calendar in one voice memo is exactly where Siri and Gemini still fumble. That's the real unlock here.
Speaking of Gemini, they're pushing hard into this same territory natively on Android. How are you thinking about that moat long term?
Espa
@akadooley Plus one! I totally agree. I've even done "Hey Espa, find me anything in my inbox that looks like a charitable receipt for taxes" 🫣
The editable memory doc is the detail that actually matters for trust because i think most AI assistants learn about you in a black box you can't inspect or correct. How does Espa handles scheduling conflicts when two people's assistants are negotiating a meeting time with each other?
The gap between "AI that drafts replies" and "AI that actually owns scheduling context across tools" is massive. What does Espa do when two calendar invites conflict and both are marked high priority — does it escalate to the user or make a call autonomously?