About Bumblebee

Bumblebee is an assistant you delegate to, much as you would to a good executive assistant. You name it, pick how it looks and sounds, and tell it what you are working on. From then on there is one continuous conversation, with no new chats to start and nothing to set up.

It handles your inbox and calendar, prepares you for meetings, keeps track of what you and others promised, makes documents and decks, and runs errands on the web. It asks before anything leaves your hands.

BA Tools makes Bumblebee. You can find BA Tools at batools.org.

We build it for people whose time and attention are the scarce part: chief executives, VPs and directors, and the managers who keep projects moving. They do not want to configure software, and they judge an assistant by whether they can trust it.

A few rules decide most of how the product works.

• Plain language. You never see error codes or technical terms. When something goes wrong, it says what happened, what it is doing about it and what you can do.
• Ask once, at the right level. You approve a plan, not every step, and by default anything that reaches other people waits for your OK.
• Earn each interruption. It keeps quiet hours, batches what can wait into a brief, and holds back a suggestion it is unsure of.
• Memory you can see. Everything it knows about you is on a page you can correct, with where each fact came from.

Bumblebee is built in stages, and each stage has to be something a person can use. Before a stage counts as done, an independent reviewer reads every change and reports problems with correctness, privacy and security. That reviewer is a separate AI system that can read the code but not change it.

Each problem gets a decision: fixed before the stage closes, scheduled for a named later point, or set aside with a reason. The reviewer then checks each fix. There have been ten of these rounds so far, from the first version of the conversation through to the cloud computer that runs errands on the web.

Bumblebee runs in your web browser at app.askbumblebee.com, and you can add it to your phone's home screen. You can type or talk to it. It works with Google accounts: Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, and Google Drive for saving the files it makes.

It is in a closed alpha with a small group of people. If you sign in before you have an invitation, you join the waitlist and we write to you when a place opens.

The same assistant and the same conversation will reach more places: apps for iPhone and Android, a speaker for your desk or home, and a desktop app. Microsoft email and calendar are planned too. We do not publish dates; the changelog records each one as it arrives.

Email hello@askbumblebee.com for anything: questions, support, privacy requests, legal matters or a security report.