Twos is a handy to-do list app with exactly the right amount of AI

A lot of AI tools promise something like magic. Just write down all the stuff you need to do, or better yet, just let the tool record every second of your life, and presto manifesto, it’ll do… something. Buy plane tickets, maybe, or magically reorder your calendar to maximize your flow state. The idea is huge and enticing, that you could just live your life and your AI assistant will make everything happen on your behalf. But hardly any of it works.

The developers of the app Twos are taking a much more cautious and, as a result, much more actually useful approach. Twos is an app for taking notes, managing to-dos, and generally making lists of any and every kind — Parker Klein, the app’s creator, just calls it “a place to write things down.” Klein has been working on the app for nearly a decade, first as a tool just for himself and most recently as a true startup. I’ve been using Twos off and on for a couple of years, and there’s a lot to like about the app.

The Twos AI approach, which Klein and cofounder Joe Steilberg call “smart suggestions,” is to use AI to help you simply take the first step in getting something done. If you write down the name of a movie, Twos might offer you a link to a JustWatch search or the IMDb page for that movie. If you write a person’s name and phone number, it can add them to your contacts with one tap. If you’re making a grocery list, it’ll send you to Amazon or Walmart or Instacart to buy it.

The logic behind all these suggestions is really simple: Twos looks for certain words and phrases to determine what you’re trying to do and which integration makes the most sense. (You can pick and choose, too — I never use Uber Eats, for instance, so I turned that off entirely.) All the smart suggestions really do is take the first step. They’re definitely not perfect — when I type “bake blueberry muffins,” it offers me an Allrecipes link, which is helpful and relevant, and a Google Maps search for “blueberry muffins around me,” which is not. But even in the feature’s early days, I’ve found it way more useful than almost every other, vastly more ambitious productivity tool.

Twos also has a built-in chatbot, which you can use to ask questions about your notes. If you use your note-taking app like a journal, this can be really cool — “what was the name of that Thai food place we went to a few weeks ago?” is a surprisingly common question in my life. Lots of apps have something like this, and they all suffer from the same problem: if you don’t put everything in the app, the search isn’t that useful. But whether it’s Notion or Dropbox or Twos, the AI integrations reward the heaviest users.

AI turns Twos into not just my to-do list but the jumping-off point for all my tasks. Since the app works across platforms — it’s fundamentally a web app, but there are versions for Android and iOS, Windows and Mac, and more — it’s easy to just dump information into. Then, when it’s time to leave for the restaurant I wrote down and promptly forgot the name of, I open Twos, tap the sparkles that appear next to any item with a smart suggestion, and it opens Google Maps and directs me there. You can store and organize things inside of Twos, but I find myself using it transiently, just for the small things in day-to-day life. I need to make bread: click the sparkles, bread recipes appear. Remember to buy those Sesame Street bath toys for the kid: click the sparkles, Amazon search done. Ollie’s birthday is December 7th: click the sparkles, in my contacts.

For now, the Twos smart suggestions are only available in beta testing, and there’s a waitlist for new users. (Though Klein did tell me that if you sign up and use the code “Verge,” you’ll be able to skip the line.) Klein and Steilberg are working on more integrations and more ways to do even more with just a few words of your writing. They’re obviously enticed by how far this might go. Why not automatically buy the toys or start the grocery delivery and take a cut for themselves? It’s an age-old idea, that one. Any.do tried it years ago; there was even a frenzy of apps like Magic that would do it all via text message. Even the Alexa business model used to depend on you being willing to just shout “buy toilet paper” at your speaker and trust it to do the rest.

There’s just one problem with the idea: it doesn’t work. There are too many logistical questions, too many ways to screw it up, and too many consequences for getting it wrong that it’s not going to work anytime soon. If ever.

In the meantime, the best AI tools work the way Twos does: by just helping you get started. Some apps help you search for information even when you don’t know exactly how to ask for it; others write the first draft of code or an email to get you started. AI as a complete solution to just about anything still feels like fiction. AI as a first step? Pretty useful.