There’s been a lot of talk about the power of robots and how they are going to take over the Internet. Wanting to see what all the fuss was about, I decided to dive in and see if I could find my own little robot to put to work.

 
So let me introduce you to Amy. She’s been my handy little robot for a couple of weeks now, Her job is to sit there on the Internet waiting for my next request to coordinate my next appointment. That’s all she does – book appointments in my calendar. So far she’s helped me schedule over 20 meetings in a reasonably accurate way.

Now I must admit early on I thought she wasn’t perfect. There were times when my request for “next week” seemed to be ignored and a proposed meeting for Thursday morning was offered as Thursday afternoon. So I raised the question with their Human support and guess what – the error was at my end and how I had set up my calendar. Amy was doing exactly as she should have been – saving me many minutes of email ping pong deciding which time/day combination suited both parties.

 
As an introduction to the world of artificial intelligence she’s a breeze to work with. All I need to do is cc her in on an email requesting a meeting or call, and she takes over from there.

 
Coffee meetings, in person meetings, Google Hangouts – she can take care of them all. You can help her by loading up a series of preferences for where you meet, how long the meeting should be for, and gaps between meetings so you’re not rushing from one to another.

 
She learns as she goes too. She now knows that my physio appointment is booked in town – ideally on a Friday – and I need 20 minutes to get there and back. The receptionist thinks Amy is an absolute blast. Now I can set up Amy to respond to emails directly from her with me cc’d in and the two of them can work out the best time for the next appointment without me being involved. How cool is that!

 
Apparently, she’s capable of some complex appointment setting tasks. For instance, for a meeting of multiple people she can email each person individually to coordinate all their diaries, and then, from the intelligence thus gained, pick the time that suits me. Appointment setting Jiu Jitsu!

 
And to keep me on track, every Monday morning I receive a note from her telling me all the meetings she’s booked the previous week and those she is still struggling to confirm. Yes, she’s persistent but not in a totally annoying way. From what I can see she will try a couple of times to make the meeting work and if nobody responds then she lets me know so I can get involved if I need to.

 
That’s it really. A very simple robot doing a seemingly simple task which can actually be deceptively complicated when you have busy people trying to co-ordinate their diaries.

 
Want to see her in action? Let’s catch up and talk about online marketing – just send me an email I’ll get Amy involved and we can schedule a call. (And yes, if you don’t want an Amy and would prefer an Andrew there is a male option.)