Skip to main content

LinkedIn launches standalone personal assistant app, LinkedIn Contacts

linkedin contacts
Image used with permission by copyright holder

A personal assistant in your pocket is one way of thinking about LinkedIn’s new and third standalone app, LinkedIn Contacts, which launched today

LinkedIn is figuring quickly that the omnipresence of a mobile app can offer far more to professionals than the Web can. And for busy business-types that don’t already have an assistant, it’s always nice to have a sidekick to tell you what meeting you should be at or how you know the person you’re about to meet.

Of course, LinkedIn Contacts isn’t exactly Siri – this isn’t an AI-powered app that you can chat with that you can ask questions of; it’s more an address book with networking capabilities. LinkedIn Contacts pulls your contacts from your address book, email accounts, and calendars, and acts as a manager for all of this information. Other sources that LinkedIn pulls from include CardMunch, LinkedIn’s standalone business scanning app, Evernote, TripIt, Outlook, Yahoo, Gmail, and of course LinkedIn.

This is part of the more active approach LinkedIn has recently been taking. By making moves in becoming a mobile platform for managing your contacts, there is no doubt that time spent on the app is bound to grow. 

Once you’ve synced up your contacts, on the desktop version of the app, your email, mobile, Evernote, or whatever platform you use to save your contact’s information, everything is stored on LinkedIn. The neat thing about LinkedIn is that all of these contacts show up in one place, and the app offers a powerful filter to sort through your growing little black book. On the mobile app you can even jot down notes about them and how you met. On top of this, there’s a tab partitioned for all notes that you’ve added to your To-Do list, and another for the calendar. These tabs aren’t available on the desktop app, however.

linkedin contacts profile page
Image used with permission by copyright holder

What’s particularly useful about the app is the availability of a timeline that lists important interactions with each contact on both desktop and mobile. You’ll even find a list of the most recent emails that you can tap open inside of LinkedIn. It’s a clever reminder about how you met that person, and you don’t even have to lift a finger since the details about your relationship are aggregated automatically.

LinkedIn Contacts has a ways to go before it’ll be accepted for its intended use as a personal assistant, but it’s an interesting first step into the arena. 

Editors' Recommendations

Francis Bea
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Francis got his first taste of the tech industry in a failed attempt at a startup during his time as a student at the…
X rival Threads could be about to get millions of more users
Instagram Threads app.

Threads -- Meta’s rival to X, formerly Twitter -- has just launched in the European Union (EU), a market with nearly half a billion people.

The app launched in the U.S. to much fanfare in July, with Meta hoping to attract X users disillusioned with the turbulence on the platform since Elon Musk acquired it for $44 billion 14 months ago.

Read more
X (formerly Twitter) returns after global outage
A white X on a black background, which could be Twitter's new logo.

X, formerly known as Twitter, went down for about 90 minutes for users worldwide early on Thursday ET.

Anyone opening the social media app across all platforms was met with a blank timeline. On desktop, users saw a message that simply read, "Welcome to X," while on mobile the app showed suggestions for accounts to follow.

Read more
How to create multiple profiles on a Facebook account
A series of social media app icons on a colorful smartphone screen.

Facebook (and, by extension, Meta) are particular in the way that they allow users to create accounts and interact with their platform. Being the opposite of the typical anonymous service, Facebook sticks to the rule of one account per one person. However, Facebook allows its users to create multiple profiles that are all linked to one main Facebook account.

In much the same way as Japanese philosophy tells us we have three faces — one to show the world, one to show family, and one to show no one but ourselves — these profiles allow us to put a different 'face' out to different aspects or hobbies. One profile can keep tabs on your friends, while another goes hardcore into networking and selling tech on Facebook Marketplace.

Read more