NLP Calendar computer

To me having single function ambient devices particularly ones that you can voice interact with are beautiful.  For people using them, it's clear what they do and how to accomplish it.  You talk to it.  At our house, with four kids and lots of pets, we have lots of activities as you can imagine.  To create a voice interactive dedicated calendar I placed an HDMI Windows compute stick in the back of a small TV.  I have that machine running Google calendar from bootup.  It is always displaying the week view so you can walk by it in the hallway and see it ambiently what's going on and what’s next.  Next to it is an Amazon Echo that's connected to the same Google calendar.  You need only remain there, talk to the Echo and see the calendar updated.  “Alexa add to calendar dentist appointment on June 3rd”  etc… It then pops up on the calendar shortly after.

The idea was to make the creation of any calendar event and review as trivial as possible.  This way there was almost no effort in adding/reviewing the calendar.  There is no reason to not be current.   We also have phone apps and webpages, as needed, when out and about but they require tapping on them to manipulate, not as easy.

It would be awesome if the screen was just a calendar device with voice interactive capability built into it.  Then I would not need the Amazon Echo or the Windows compute stick.  We've thought of building a product that was nothing more than a screen and calendar especially as displays have become less expensive.  We feel to be complete it would also have to allow for drawing on the calendar as many people still like analog-type calendar entry.

As a side note, Google really should provide a voice input mechanism for their web page calendar.  This way I could drop the Amazon Echo and have fewer things to track.  Google would need to make it preferably keyword activated, however, as we’d like not to use a mouse to tap a microphone button.  Either way, they should have a full natural language interface for the calendar.  

The dedicated calendar device….It’s on our to-do list.  :-)