See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based BHI has been offering solutions focused on protecting users from information overload, represented by Swingmail. Swingmail is a minimalistic inbox and reply-only app that aggregates messages from multiple social network accounts which helps reduce information overload and clutter.

BHI has also developed Swingbook, a prioritizing contact list seamlessly integrated into the Swingmail app, as well as Swingcal, a minimalistic calendar app that focuses on the agenda one has with someone up to a week in the future. But both functions of these apps have been incorporated into the Swingmail app.

See also:

• Japan’s BHI launches mobile apps that prevent info overload in messaging
• Swingmail: A new app from Japan to better manage email and social messages

The company introduced a new app called Swingdo on Friday, aiming to help users streamline their task management like managing todos and appointments on calendar, or check e-mails that they forget to reply to by telling them what to do next automatically. Based on a user’s input and its history, this app determines the priority of every task and inserts appointments scheduled on the Swingcal or scheduler app within these tasks when necessary.

Generally speaking, “stock-type” information management tool like Trello would be helpful to manage todos from the point of view seeing which task is completed or not. To communicate with one’s counterpart or business partner, Slack and other “flow-type” messaging tools like chat and e-mail apps are convenient. In addition, a calendar tool would be convenient for managing planned tasks or the history of these in a time sequence.

That said, one will probably need three different types of tools at least in managing tasks the three aspects of time sequence, completeness/incompleteness and contacts. However, we merely see these three solutions synchronizing updates of tasks with each others (For instance, Trello will never add task updates automatically based on interactions on Slack.)

Swingdo aims to manage tasks in one app by integrating these three items. In the app, the priority of each task will be automatically determined according to the due date and estimated amount of work that a user inputs. Regarding tasks based on received e-mails and scheduled appointments in a calendar app, their work amounts are set as 15 minutes by default but users can change this manually. Following the priority that the Swingdo app presents, all the users have to do is to complete such tasks accordingly.

BHI CEO Yasuhiro Himukashi explained:

When using our app, one will no longer experience the pain of thinking what to do next. Regardless of the pros and cons in our team, we decided to make the app that automatically determines the priority of each task and can’t be manually adjusted. Otherwise, users would be likely to put off tedious tasks for later and tend to forget to do them.

This latest Swingdo app is version 1.0 and still remains technically dubious. However, the company wants to keep updating it as their development advances thus they want to incorporate natural language processing and machine learning into the app so that it will better understand the context when adding tasks based on e-mails and calendar updates.

Possible integration with self-driving vehicles

Himukashi says, it will be possible to integrate the Swingdo app with self-driving vehicles in the future when many people are using it on a daily basis.

When one goes out, one’s self-driving vehicle would be able to assume where to do if knowing one’s appointment. So if one has saved a task in the Swingdo app, one can trust the driving to the vehicle even without telling where to go.

If one’s tasks are totally managed in the Swingdo app, it may automatically hail a ride-sharing car by interacting with the Uber app when one needs to go somewhere for an appointment. The company claims that Swingmail is intended to review what one has done while Swingdo is to look at what will happen to someone.

Leveraging the location data as well as task updates registered in the Swingdo app, it may be possible for the platform to predict what one wants to do next by leveraging artificial intelligence.

He added:

From the big data perspective, this can be applied to predicting traffic jams in the future.

Coinciding with the launch of the Swingdo app, BHI has upgraded the Swingmail app to version 7.0 while adding new functions like curating e-mails and highlighting critical messages. It plans to integrate with messaging platforms of mobile carriers around the world to give users a better experience.

Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy