SC has long been plagued by the boring tedium of the scheduling tools built into Microsoft Outlook. Every day, he'll get a half-dozen identically written meeting requests, all automatically generated from a couple of safe, inoffensive templates. These things all tend to run together after a while, but they work because businesspeople have discovered a powerful method for manipulating other people -- if you place a little automatically-generated reminder in other people's calendars (assuming they let their lives be dictated by a single piece of unimpressive, buggy proprietary software), they will robotically show up for meetings, call into teleconferences, or otherwise do what you want. The downside is that in order to make it effective, you need to set the alarms on the reminders to go off just minutes before the intended event, and the illocutionary force of "Please call into 500-555-1234, passcode 5678" is rather limited.
Nobody knows better than linguists that speaking the right language to people can improve the success of your communicative goals, and so your host decided to apply his knowledge of both linguistics and Java to create the world's first scheduling program fully backed by the power of natural language processing. Behold -- the iNag!
iNag starts with helpful user-nameable contact names that will never be reproduced in your e-mail, so you can group people into the mental categories you actually file them under. iNag will integrate these names with names in your Outlook address book so that "The Ones You Invite To Social Events Or Else" never know that you feel that way about the Vice President of Operations and the annoyingly chatty secretary down the hall.
But iNag is so much more than a tool for commerce -- the real power behind it comes from the REiterating Mail INtegration Device (REMIND), a sophisticated natural-language generator that not only can adopt your persona, but customizes reminder messages as important events grow closer. To demonstrate, we'll walk through an example useful for business and personal life -- sending a birthday card.
You begin by selecting from a library of personas appropriate to business or personal life:
Then you set the event type that you're going for, a date, and reminder notices, just like in any other scheduling application. iNag will then produce a customized set of notifications and escalating reminders. If the message recipient doesn't get their task done, iNag will automatically send out escalating reminders as the deadline gets closer. Here's how iNag would remind your recipient to send a birthday card, in a couple of styles.
First, the Jewish Mother:
The default manager persona:
And former coach of the Minnesota Vikings and Arizona Cardinals, Dennis Green:
iNag with REMIND technology -- coming soon in the Home and Office Productivity aisles of fine retailers like Staples, Office Depot and Best Buy near you (just as soon as Semantic Compositions Software can get some venture funding).
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Posted by: franklinmarshall | December 29, 2011 at 12:09 AM