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Meekan for Slack — Your Slack team's scheduling robot assistant
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@rrhoover I think this is similar to what Facebook did with Games :) They bring silly flash games and make them enjoyable to play.
@shaanvp if you're interested in building things for Slack, we have a small community of devs brainstorming about such things over here: http://dev4slack.xoxco.com/
@rrhoover absolutely, I think Slack is disrupting the 'office space'. Tools like Meekan turn Slack into an awesome customisable platform. Great job @mmariansky and @eyalyavor!
Hi Product Hunt!
We really should stop micro-managing our calendars. Instead, calendars should be smart enough to be sent out to negotiate and arrange our meetings for us, equipped with two pieces of information:
Your intent and urgency
“Quick video chat with @jane and @ron sometime next week”, “Sales meeting ASAP”
Your Availability ID
Your prior engagements (actually, your calendar knows quite well about those), and your preferences: do you bunch your meetings as early as possible? Do you have a “no meetings” day? Is there someone you’re desperate to meet with, and will clear your agenda whenever he’s available?
Now negotiate a new event
When arranging a new meeting, we take your intent, and merge everyone’s availability IDs to come up with the optimal time for this specific group to come together. And if it breaks, and someone can’t show, we already have all the info to offer a “second best” reschedule option.
Our Slack robot
We found Slack to be an ideal environment for our scheduling engine. Invite our robot to join any of your groups, and just ask him to arrange meetings for everyone. When a meeting is booked, it immediately gets synced into your calendar.
Try things like:
- We want to have lunch next week
- Can we have a quick video chat tomorrow (and instantly also get a room.co link)
- Remind me to pick up the dry cleaning today at 6pm (and have that reminder synced into your calendar)
And coming soon, stuff like:
- How busy am I on Thursday?
- Clear my entire afternoon tomorrow
Thanks @rrhoover for the kind intro, and @jibly for the post!
We welcome your feedback - Where should we improve? What else would you have our robot do?
@ronch We just train him. Out there, he works independently, 100% human-free
@mmariansky That is super cool. Organizing around a schedule is indeed more complicated than what it should be. We've already installed it on our Slack and are starting to test it out.
@thibautdavoult Thanks! I signed up for early access to Solid - maybe we have a collaboration opportunity?
Looks great! Couple of questions. How do you build each Availability ID? What's your business model? Will you charge for it (couldn't find any info)?
Thanks and congrats on the PH launch!
@sivola Thanks!
Explicitly, we're combining your free/busy info from all the calendars you connect (A lot of our users connect their home as well as work schedules), and the preferences you set. Behind the scenes, a machine learning component, and a lot of manual weight tweaking keeps improving the time suggestions the engine gives (They are always ranked from the best one downwards). This works both on the personal level, and on the group level.
Current products will remain free, as our scheduling engine evolves, there will be another tier of paid products.
We've been playing around with it this past week and it works great! It'd be great to get some kind of notification minutes before the meeting starts maybe? And definitely add Mekan to DM conversations :} but the team is loving it so far <3
@gihgoes You can talk to our bot in a DM, and discreetly add events to your calendars. However, Slack's limitations prevent us from adding it to a DM between two humans :)
Thanks for the feedback!
This makes scheduling great, but we still have to use other software for actual meetings. I hope Slack soon adds voice and screen sharing support that their acquisition of Screenhero in January should make possible. (http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/28...)
@matejmarjanovic We're integrated with room.co, so that whenever you ask our bot for a video conference\call, it will automatically add a Room-URL as the meeting's location. Might save you a step or two :)
@matejmarjanovic Indeed! We just connected Do.com to Slack as well to help meetings run productively once they're scheduled ;) http://blog.do.com/post/12291191...
Big thank you to @Eyal for taking the time to help me with some connection issues I had. Excellent service.
Great job @mmariansky and @eyalyavor!
We were thinking to make something similar for Skype. will be really useful for teams!
@kiddiarni If we don't pass, please let us know. We'd love to work with your IT guys and make sure we comply
@mmariansky @kiddiarni You passed and are up & running now. Feature request: Add Meekan to DM conversations.
@realpb We've actually seen that it encourages people to keep tidy calendars, as well as set aside personal blocks for doing actual work. Just schedule some meetings when it's least convenient and they'll get the lesson :)
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