Piet Stop!
One of my favorite paintings in the whole world is Broadway Boogie Woogie, Piet Mondrian's last painting (well, the last one he finished). In my head it always depicted an overhead map of Manhattan with cars driving down the streets, and I wanted to turn it into a traffic simulator.
This code creates possible Broadway Boogie Woogies, then lets the little cars run.
True. We started out trying to limit the conversation to just scheduling-related topics. But very early on we realized that since this is all happening in a conversation, people expect him to be able to carry some smalltalk - because when he doesn't, he's perceived as stupid - he can't even say "hello" properly, how can he possibly do scheduling?
(if this is interesting, I wrote about it a few month ago in much more detail: https://medium.com/building-the-robot-assistant/cheating-on-... )
Meekan is a Slack bot that's actually 100% AI, takes natural language commands, and is used by 10's of thousands of real people. The Median time to schedule a meeting with Meekan is 53 seconds, which means he's delivering real value.
Not trying to be an AGI, the bot looks in everyone's calendars and prefs and suggests the best time to meet. By that, he's trimming the huge decision tree into a small, ranked suggestion list that's easy to grasp and decide upon.
An assistive tool that saves tons of time and frustrations. Nothing less.