Kanga

Logo
Integration in Google Calendar
Snippet of some of the logic behind Kanga on Voiceflow

Domain.com entry: KangaLovesTimbits.tech

Inspiration

A study by Hybrid Works, looking at employee's preferences for a post-covid world, showed that 72% of people wanting to continue to work from home at least 2 days a week. More so, every large company is now trying to figure out how to deal with this new hybrid environment. Even before the pandemic, in some of our remote teams there was a lot of guessing or planning done to figure out if your coworkers were in the office or not that week.

What it does

Kanga bridges the gap between teams in a hybrid environment. It does so by keeping track of team member’s calendars and allows for easy updates whenever someone wishes to change their daily preference.

A user can directly update their status through Kanga’s interface or by asking their digital assistant (like Alexa). Depending on the status set (Work from home/In Office), the user’s calendar invites will be updated to easily join virtual or in person meetings.

Kanga also keeps track of where everyone is that day, so mid-meeting you can always ask if Tony Stark’s in the office to see if it’s easy to pull him in.

This allows you to stop guessing whether or not someone’s around and to more easily plan your day around them.

How we built it

Kanga's heart and soul is built on Voiceflow. As a voice assistant, it was (relatively) easy to create it on Voiceflow and integrate it with many custom API’s hosted on Autocode. The APIs handle communications to popular calendar clients such as Google Calendar. The natural language processing is handled by the host device (Google Assistant/Amazon Alexa).

Challenges we ran into

As a team of 2 we had a lot of difficulty juggling the workload, especially when it came to non-dev work such as video editing and Devpost submissions. Neither of us had used the Voiceflow platform before, and had little to no experience using smart devices. So we challenged ourselves to learn the terminonlogy and have a deeper understandin of what Intents were and prompts worked. We also had to pivot ideas a few times and only really started hacking mid-day Saturday.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite all the setbacks that we faced, we created a fully fledged out product that can seamlessly integrate with anyone’s calendar with virtually no set up barriers.

What's next for Kanga

Kanga needs a lot more training. In the future we hope to add more utterances and intents for a smoother experience. Further, we hope to add more functionality to Kanga to make it even more powerful. Features like, seat reservation in open-concept offices, daily health questionnaires and a focus on mental health.