Google Calendar to help you make the most out of spare time

Google's Calendar features are something of a riposte to rivals like Apple, Microsoft

Online technology's urgent emails, calendar updates and videoconferences may propel business, but the system at times seems to suck energy from our personal lives.

The answer, according to Google, is more technology.

On Wednesday, the company introduced new features to its popular calendar that will enable people to programme in their aspirations for times when they don't have work or meetings scheduled.

Google's algorithms will then seek appropriate gaps in a schedule in which stuff like exercise or discussing life with one's spouse might be appropriate. While this means putting more of ourselves inside the machine, Google argues that its method is more efficient.

"It's a tool to help us against ourselves, and all the short-term things we agree to do in our calendar," said Dan Ariely, a university professor, best-selling author and Google employee who worked on the new tool. "Empty time where you think you'll do something loses precedence to things on the calendar that are concrete and specific." The product, called Goals, works like this: Inside the online calendar, people choose from a menu of goals like "exercise," "me time" or "skill building". The software then asks for some specifics, like how often a person wants to run, for what duration and typically when in the day.

It then scours the white spaces in a calendar for possible times and maps out a schedule, filling those times with the desired aspiration. Afterward, the goal can be marked completed or not, which helps the algorithm work out a better schedule over time.

Along with Goals, Google is introducing a calendar feature that enables two people in the same company to find mutually convenient meeting times, by enabling a software "agent" to scour both datebooks and pick an optimal time. If you defer a goal, Calendar will make time for it later.

Not coincidentally, Google's Calendar features are something of a riposte to competitors like Apple, Microsoft and Facebook, which have been getting into the life management business.

In the last several years, tech companies have worked hard to build reinforcement systems. The language-learning app Duolingo, and the fitness device Fitbit, for example, have features that enable people to post their progress on Facebook. Presumably, friends' encouragement programmes people to stay with a goal. Artificial intelligence (AI) software that behaves socially aims to do the same. A New York company called X.ai makes personal assistant software that also scours calendars. The software assumes an AI persona, called Amy Ingram that has chatty updates about dates it makes.

People talk to Apple's Siri, a kind of intelligent agent that looks things up. Earlier this month, Microsoft announced that Cortana, an AI personal assistant that the company calls "she," could be used to create scheduling "bots" that would also interact with spoken commands.

©2016 The New York Times News Service