Singapore start-up creates virtual assistant to schedule meetings

Singapore start-up Mimetic.ai has created an artificially intelligent personal assistant which automatically helps users schedule meetings.

The virtual assistant, named Evie, is essentially a bot with its own email address. Users link their work or personal calendars to Evie and copy the bot’s email address into their own emails whenever they are trying to set up a meeting.

From there, Evie automatically checks for available timeslots in the user’s calendar, sends out emails to the other participants suggesting a date and time, and finally sends a meeting invitation to all parties once a date has been agreed upon.

It also knows when a participant sends an email to cancel or postpone a meeting, and will automatically send out a new round of emails to arrange another date or time.

The idea first came to Mimetic.ai co-founders Lee Jin Hian and Praveen Velu when they were both employees at Yahoo working to build a video platform. Members of their team worked in five different cities with varying time zones – Sunnyvale, New York, Bangalore, Taiwan and Singapore.

“Getting together for meetings was a real pain,” said Velu. “That’s how we came up with the idea to build a [virtual assistant to help schedule meetings].”