[mmatty]

Meekan is a Slack bot that's actually 100% AI, takes natural language commands, and is used by 10's of thousands of real people. The Median time to schedule a meeting with Meekan is 53 seconds, which means he's delivering real value. Not trying to be an AGI, the bot looks in everyone's calendars and prefs and suggests the best time to meet. By that, he's trimming the huge decision tree into a small, ranked suggestion list that's easy to grasp and decide upon. An assistive tool that saves tons of time and frustrations. Nothing less.

[note:I'm the product manager at Meekan, https://meekan.com]

[PascalsMugger]

Just curious, but why do you refer to it as "he", especially in this context where you are touting it as an actual non-human? Not to single you out, I see people referring to all these other things as (usually female) "her" and it just unsettles me to think that people are anthropomorphizing these things so much.

On a related tangent, often these same people will refer to animals as "it", too, which is even more curious. A living being with an actual gender doesn't rate a gendered pronoun, yet a piece of software does.

[mmatty]

True. We started out trying to limit the conversation to just scheduling-related topics. But very early on we realized that since this is all happening in a conversation, people expect him to be able to carry some smalltalk - because when he doesn't, he's perceived as stupid - he can't even say "hello" properly, how can he possibly do scheduling? (if this is interesting, I wrote about it a few month ago in much more detail: https://medium.com/building-the-robot-assistant/cheating-on-... )