Related Articles
Tempo, the calendar app that uses Siri-like artificial intelligence to schedule meetings and dial in on conference calls, is racking up user data to decide where it will land next.
The app, created by Tempo AI, highlighted its popular conference call features on Wednesday. While the company — which comes from SRI International, the same place that created Apple’s Siri — won’t share its user numbers, it revealed that people have made 1 million one-tap conference calls with the app since its launch in February.
This feature lets users dial in on a conference call with a tap of a button, leaving Tempo to automatically dial the telephone number and call-in codes. While it may sound simple, the app is harnessing the power of artificial intelligence, allowing it to discern the numbers and sequences required to access the conference.
This ranges from entering one access code, to scenarios where you also have to pick from multiple languages or country codes. Tempo AI CEO Raj Singh said the app’s performance gets better with time because it learns from each experience, picking up the variations from tens of thousands of different patterns in the data.
“It’s not a perfect system — it is still continuing to learn, but we’ve worked so many patterns now that it’s better than it was before,” he said.
The company has verified that Tempo can support at least 20 conference call services including GotoMeeting, WebEx, UberConference, join.me, Fuze, and FreeConference. In addition to dialing conference calls, the app’s recent updates let users invite attendees to events, share events with contacts, and set Gmail as the default e-mail client in Tempo. It also can suggest relevant guests based on previous meetings.
The demand for Tempo rocketed when the app launched earlier this year, leaving many on a waiting list. Now, the list is gone and Tempo is preparing to expand. Singh said the company is doing well in Canada, where it launched in April, and it plans to get to “as many places as we can and as soon as we can, mostly this year.”
He acknowledged that Tempo users are limited by only having the app on smartphones (Tempo is available for iOS, but it’s not optimized for the iPad), but the company is still trying to figure out if it would be a good fit on other devices.
While smartphones are the go-to device for real-time scheduling and meeting features, tablets are more for a “lean back” experience, or, in some cases, can mimic a desktop experience.
“We want to make it pervasive,” Singh said. “On your desktop, your calendar and e-mail are conjoined. It’s not clear whether the best option is to integrate into those experiences or offer a different kind of experience with less focus on scheduling, or maybe something completely different.”
Tempo is also considering other territories, like wearable tech or smart TVs and cars. Smart cars are of particular interest, given the amount of people who like to take conference calls in their vehicles.
“Automotive is a place where there’s a high value of connecting your calendar to the car dash — ‘dial me in,’ or ‘I’m late; what’s the drive time look like,'” Singh said.
But this is still just a part of the discussion at this point, not a reality. Above all, Singh said, Tempo wants to make sure that whatever direction it takes, it’s a good fit for users.
“You can port to whatever device you want, but you want it to be a better user experience,” Singh said.
