[ivan_gammel]

This is really a good question. Progress with calendars has stopped 10-15 years ago, the only major innovation relevant to it was Calendly, but that’s it. I guess it’s hard to imagine new features or even incremental quality updates as a viable business idea.

[jamalaramala]

> I guess it’s hard to imagine new features or even incremental quality updates as a viable business idea.

There is market for privacy; but the missing piece, after so many years, is how to synchronize calendars in a seamless way.

[ivan_gammel]

It’s not just that. Manual entry is still a thing happening too often. Yes, some apps allow to put your booking in a calendar, but that doesn’t cover all use cases. You call, make an appointment — getting an ical via SMS after the call would be great. You open a website, then check there the opening hours or schedule, taking that information to your calendar app would be great. Etc etc.

[woleium]

do you need that clutter on your calendar though, when a voice query to perplexity (or siri et al when they catch up) will answer your question about opening hours when you need the information?

[ivan_gammel]

Voice queries exist in a small bubble, most users in the world are not used to it. And of course AI may never be able to catch up with hyperlocal information that may not even be available to robots.

As for the clutter, no, there won’t be clutter. There exists a conventional 3-view UI for calendars, but there can be more context-specific variants. E.g. separating awareness from booking on customer journey means that first I add a reminder with the opening hours and later calendar will present an opportunity to book.

[freddie_mercury]

A quick Google tells me Perplexity doesn't support my language, so no a voice query to Perplexity won't work.

"Perplexity is now available in Korean (한국어), Japanese (日本語), German (Deutsch), French (Français), and Spanish (Español)"

It's missing 3 of the top 5 languages spoken in the world today. It only has 3 of the top 10 most spoken languages in the world.

Also everyone in my country drives scooters and I don't see how voice commands are supposed to work with that kind of setup.

[godelski]

  > Perplexity is now available in Korean (한국어)

Wow, usually Korea takes awhile to get things.

  > Also everyone in my country drives scooters and I don't see how voice commands are supposed to work with that kind of setup.

Even if they were supported I would suspect that you would have some issues. My partner is Korean (I'm not) and when she goes back to Korea and we video chat while she's on the subway then her airpods' "voice isolation" systems actually amplify background noise rather, drowning her out, rather than doing the opposite (its intended usage).

Being an ML researcher... I have some suspicions as to what is the root cause. I can't tell you exactly without having access, but I can tell you that it is VERY common for models to be trained without sufficient augmentation, let alone without sufficient diversity in data. So it is fairly common for the system to not be useful in certain environments. Worse, when you hyper focus on maximizing test data results you are extremely likely to perform data leakage (this is quite common and at this point I'd say you should assume it exists) and not enough evaluation on completely held out sets. Especially data which is significantly dissimilar to what you trained on (even when it is "in distribution"[0])

[0] This term can be a lot of things... so it must be interpreted in context.

[TeMPOraL]

That's a filtering issue. For any case less trivial than checking if something is open right now, calendar view is superior. If you want to plan something, calendar view spanning multiple days, combining the thing with your existing plans and events, is pretty much a must.