Google has filed a patent for a smart calendar

Electronic calendars are increasingly being used to keep track of important events and organize daily schedules.

However, entering event details into the calendar system can be tedious and time-consuming. Further, manually typed information can also be prone to errors because users may sometimes enter the wrong information. For example, a user may enter the time of a meeting with a manager as 10 pm instead of 10 am. Furthermore, users’ schedules may change or need to be updated when new events are either scheduled or occur in users’ lives. For example, a user may need to go on an unexpected business trip to London and forget that he has concert tickets in San Francisco during the trip. If the user had remembered, he might have been able to sell the concert tickets.

Google’s smart calendar system will be able to identify such errors and notify the users about potential scheduling problems in their calendars.

The system parses user logs to obtain user behavior and determine whether the event details are consistent. For example, the user logs also include GPS information. Based on a user’s given location, X, after 9 pm over the course of several days, the system learns that a user is at location X if the time is after 9 pm on any given day. A location Y is 30 minutes from location X. If a user tries to schedule a meeting at location Y for 9:15 pm, the system infers that the user may not reach location Y in time for the meeting and propose that the user reschedule the meeting.

Furthermore, the system creates a set of rules created from the obtained user behavior. It may include determining the user’s location or predicted location at the date and time of the event and comparing the user’s location to the event’s location. Further, it determines if the venue of the event location at a venue has business hours and if the meeting at the venue is consistent with the business hours. For example, a user, Koji had a business associate, Jeff. If Koji schedules a meeting with Jeff, the system assumed that the meeting is a business meeting. If Koji tries to schedule an event entitled “meeting” at 12 am with Jeff, the system assumes that this meeting is a business meeting. The system understands that normal business hours do not occur at 12 am by using pre-stored rules and information. Therefore, the system provides the user with a notification or alert the user in some way to the problematic meeting time. An example notification may be an alert with text such as “Business meeting at midnight? Did you mean 12 pm?”

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