Summer 2021

Why?

With all the tasks we need to do every day and all the preoccupations, it is hard to keep in mind everything and get them done in the right priority and on time. Especially for those who are struggling with ADHD. So there was a big need for a smart assistant to planning our tasks and events, and make sure they will be done in order. Everything started with the idea of a smart task manager assistant by Dr. Alireza Manashty, which leads us here. We call it Lively. I’m going to have a walk-through of our journey.

Is It Possible!?

The first question was that “is it possible at all?”. Well… the answer is YES! In the beginning, we broke down the problem by asking “What we expected from this assistant?”. Personally, my first problem with a regular task manager is that I should put all the tasks and their details there which needs time and extra effort. To resolve this problem we had a few ideas but the basic idea which I want to talk about is Estimation. We decided to estimate details of the task such as time, priority, sub-tasks, parent task, etc. In this case, we used LUIS which is a Language Understanding service; provided by Microsoft.

How?

We create a Luis app per person per project to get the most personalized estimation! Imagine you open your task manager or just easily say it to your voice assistants like Siri or Google to make a new task “Create problems and solution templates for people who want to meet me”. It’s not that bad but how much is it important? and How much it’s gonna take? Luis by learning your routine and your history can give you an answer. In this case for me, it would be “better get done” in other words “important but not urgent”; and it is estimated as a “medium task” which means 2 to 3 hours. Day by day, Lively will update and learn your behavior of doing tasks and offer you better estimations that are specifically for you!

It was just the beginning of our story! Lively is not limited to priority or time estimation.

Starting our journey!

In the very first days, after testing our theory in the LUIS dashboard we needed to develop a core and interface (Application) and give it to beta testers and get feedback. The first version of Lively has a C# core using Cosmos DB and for the interface; we used Telegram Messenger bot. It was helpful and we get some results which helped us to improve the core. but after all, it was not good enough. Telegram bot developed fast but, it was not user-friendly, and we needed more accessibility to implement our ideas.