Roombot | O3

Overview

Dozens of meetings are scheduled every day, but too often these meetings exceed their assigned time slots. We prefer to let the room wrap up the meeting and do the talking.

Business application

Improving efficiencies to increase the bottom line

Countless meetings are happening around the world and schedules are hard to keep. Having an application that proactively keeps team members on time increases efficiency and productivity. Integrating calendars with the physical space and conversational UI creates a solution where technology augments the need for human intervention. Since efficiency is key in business, the opportunity for technology to transform day-to-day interactions and processes could have a significant influence on the bottom line.

The experiment

Ending meetings the smart way and on time

There are a ton of creative ways to let a coworker know when it’s time to wrap up a meeting, but having the room do the talking isn’t only fun, it’s smart. To control the room’s lighting, the native MAC OS X app connects with the company’s Google Calendar and a Philips Hue Bridge. Upon detecting back-to-back meetings, Roombot then dims the room’s lighting and announces the next scheduled meeting.

Technology overview

Google Calendar We utilized the Google Calendar API to check our company calendar for internal and client meetings, to programmatically keep us on time and let us know when a new meeting was starting.
Philips Hue Smart Lighting Philips Hue provided us with the ability to control smart lights in rooms via its official Philips Hue API. When the lights flicker, our team knows it’s time to wrap up.
Swift Swift enabled us to quickly and efficiently build a native Mac OS X application to tie it all together and alert employees that another meeting is beginning soon.