App review: Your virtual personal assistant with Humin touch

The app Humin acts like a virtual personal assistant – supporting you at networking events to ensure you know whose hand you are about to shake.

Screen grabs of the app Humin, which acts like a virtual personal assistant – supporting you at networking events to ensure you know whose hand you are about to shake.

If you have ever wanted one of those incredibly efficient personal assistants that stands just behind you at networking events and whispers crucial information into your ear about the people whose hands you're shaking, Humin might be the app for you.

It aims to replace the built-in contacts feature on smartphones with its own database, integrating information from Facebook, LinkedIn, your calendar, email and voicemail with basic details such as phone numbers and email addresses.

It’s searchable even with terms such as “met last Friday”, “friend of my wife’s”, “went to Stanford” or “lives in Amman”, allowing you to cheat when you run into that crucial contact whose personal details escape you in the moment.

It has personal as well as professional applications, too. How many times have you been at a social gathering and added a bunch of new numbers to your phone at once, only to completely forget which names go with which faces in the following days? Even misspelling a name can make it difficult to retrieve the information you need.

The biggest competition for Humin is LinkedIn’s Connected, which plays a similar role, and in April this year, the company acquired Refresh.io, another app with a similar operation. Like Humin, it aims to automate all sorts of functions, giving you information before you know that you need it.

It’s part of a trend known as “predictive” or “anticipatory” computing, which refers to apps such as Google Now, the platform that learns your daily routine to give you helpful information at right times of the day – such as a reminder to leave the office at a certain time to reach a meeting given the day’s traffic.

An Android version has just been launched alongside the iOS version and you can download it at the Apple App Store or Google Play for free.

While Humin has a few kinks to work out, it’s a useful, easy-to-master tool with helpful functions, such as the digital “card” you receive when you’re in a new city, suggesting people you might want to get in touch with while there.

Until the superhuman assistant comes along, it’s a handy solution to an already crammed brain.

q&a stay social and connected

Jessica Holland finds out more about the networking app Humin:

Who’s the team behind this?

Co-founder and chief executive Ankur Jain is the son of Intelius chief executive Naveen Jain, who sells lists of public records – so make of that what you will. Mark Zuckerberg’s sister Arielle moved from Google to be senior product manager at Humin, and Will.i.am and Richard Branson took part in the app’s launch last year.

Should I be nervous about allowing this app to access not my data?

The company’s staff is serious about your “humin rights”, as it calls them. They promise never to sell your contact info, and the emails and texts “never touch our servers”, they promise. Passwords aren’t saved on to servers, but are processed locally on your own device, which is a rare precaution among technology companies.

Isn’t it a huge pain to set up a whole new contacts list on your phone?

Just setting up the app integrates all the information you already have. You can choose on a case-by-case basis what to allow it to access.

How can the app predict the information I need?

Once it has access to your calendar and RSVP’ed events on Facebook, for example, it can tell you which of your contacts are in the same city or event as you and prioritise them next time you open the app.

Do I really need this?

It can be a timesaver, at least if your friends have plenty of information about themselves online.

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