Calendar. help: Designing a workflow-based scheduling agent with humans in the loop

J Cranshaw, E Elwany, T Newman… - Proceedings of the …, 2017 - dl.acm.org
Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2017dl.acm.org
Although we may complain about meetings, they are an essential part of an information
worker's work life. Consequently, busy people spend a significant amount of time scheduling
meetings. We present Calendar. help, a system that provides fast, efficient scheduling
through structured workflows. Users interact with the system via email, delegating their
scheduling needs to the system as if it were a human personal assistant. Common
scheduling scenarios are broken down using well-defined workflows and completed as a …
Although we may complain about meetings, they are an essential part of an information worker's work life. Consequently, busy people spend a significant amount of time scheduling meetings. We present Calendar.help, a system that provides fast, efficient scheduling through structured workflows. Users interact with the system via email, delegating their scheduling needs to the system as if it were a human personal assistant. Common scheduling scenarios are broken down using well-defined workflows and completed as a series of microtasks that are automated when possible and executed by a human otherwise. Unusual scenarios fall back to a trained human assistant executing an unstructured macrotask. We describe the iterative approach we used to develop Calendar.help, and share the lessons learned from scheduling thousands of meetings during a year of real-world deployments. Our findings provide insight into how complex information tasks can be broken down into repeatable components that can be executed efficiently to improve productivity.
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