Inspiration

We decided to work on a project which would help small businesses utilize the cutting edge of AI to better serve their customers and be able to spend more time on their passion. This idea originally sparked when one of our members was talking with their barber about AI. They expressed that for a new small business it is difficult to take haircut phone appointments while also having to attend to current customers, and how an AI agent which could answer phone calls and take appointments for them would be extremely valuable. This kick-started our idea for an AI which could help small businesses by answering their phones and making appointments. We knew that larger companies would be able to have their own AI/software teams, but mom and pop businesses would want an easily configurable agent which could interface with their existing tools. For this reason we decided to target integration with Google Calendar for our MVP.

Implementation and Challenges

We built our project around Groq running Llama70b after being blown away by the low latency speech system they demonstrated Saturday morning. We had to focus on two different interfaces for our project, one with the business owners to setup their calendar and business information, and the phone interface for the customers. For our prototype we decided to mock the phone interactions with a website interface to focus on our LLM interactions with our database and API calls. One of the main challenges for our project was creating the proper tooling to enable our agent to access the owner's Google Calendar and identify potential available slots, as well as prompting to ensure it would output proper calendar events that could be utilized with the Google Cloud API.

Future Plans

We plan to make the voice real time with Hume and also looked into utilizing Trulio to interface with real calls. We hope to integrate our agent with restaurants as well and allow it to place orders in their existing systems. Additionally, we plan to allow restaurant owners to take a picture of their menu for ease of setup.fs