<p>Emu, a new mobile messaging application exiting from beta today, is not just another text messaging alternative it's a full-fledged mobile assistant allowing you to schedule appointments, share your location, set reminders, get movie showtimes or buy tickets, reserve a table, and more, thanks to an artificial intelligence engine that understands the context of your messages in order to help you take action upon them.</p><p>Also notable is the team behind this app's creation. Co-founder and CEO Gummi Hafsteinsson's background in AI and mobile, has seen him working in senior roles at a number of high-profile tech companies, including Google where he worked on Google Maps for mobile and voice search before switching to a startup called Siri. Yes, that Siri. Following Apple's acquisition, he helped to bring the assistant to the iPhone.</p><p>Meanwhile, co-founder and chief product officer Dave Feldman's user experience, design and product management background has found him working at Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL, where he full disclosure led the TechCrunch redesign back in 2011. (This was just before I joined, however, so we had never met.) He also later became an entrepreneur-in-residence at CrunchFund, the firm from TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington.</p><p>Hafsteinsson tells us that the inspiration for Emu came from his prior work on Siri. "I felt that you kind of had to engage Siri all the time, and I wanted to create an assistant that was more in the background and proactive," he says, describing Emu as something of a "Google Now-like" concept, in that it looks at a lot of data, then chimes in when it knows it can help you.</p><p><a href="http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/02/emu-a-smarter-messaging-app-with-a-built-in-assistant-exits-beta/">Keep reading...</a></p>