BUSAN — In the real world, only the big bosses get a personal secretary to manage their schedule and set up meetings at the most suitable time. But a new digital scheduling assistant may change that with just an email.

Meet Kono, a new artificially intelligent scheduling bot developed by South Korean tech startup Konolabs. The smart bot syncs with calendar apps built into smartphones like Google Calendar, and is powered by an AI engine equipped with machine learning and natural language processing capabilities.

To use Kono, you should first register your email to the Kono AI website to grant the scheduling bot access to your calendar. From then on, simply cc the scheduling bot — kono@kono.ai — when writing an email to someone about arranging a meeting. It currently supports English and Korean.


Kono’s AI engine extracts scheduling-related keywords from your email to first understand when you want to have a meeting — which can be as vague as “can we meet sometime next week” or “let’s have a conference call on Tuesday or Thursday.”

The bot then proceeds to arrange a meeting at a time that is optimal for you as well as the person that you’re looking to hold a meeting with. Even when scheduling a meeting involving multiple people, including those living in differing time zones, Kono will mediate a time that works best for everyone.

With prolonged use, Kono’s AI engine becomes “smarter” as it studies a user’s scheduling pattern to improve its recommendation algorithms.

“We built our service with a founding mission to help professionals around the world become more organized and productive,” said Konolabs co-founder and CEO YJ Min in an interview with The Korea Herald during the ITU Telecom World 2017 conference in Busan. The startup had been invited to partake in a panel discussion on the topic of “AI and future work.”

“Despite advances in tech, many people still use fragmented tools and software to communicate, creating gaps in efficiency. And so, we created Kono to help make communication more productive,” said the 45-year-old developer-turned-entrepreneur.

Corporate employees who hold frequent meetings with external partners and clients are expected to reap the most benefits from using Kono, according to the Seoul-based startup.

Some users have asked, “Does this ensure privacy?” According to Min, privacy protection has been a major focus point from the startup from the get-go as its service works via consistent access to personal data, Min said.

“Kono has been programmed to collect only scheduling-related content from the emails it is cc’ed to. It neglects all other data that is not related,” said the CEO. “We’ve also taken technical measures to encrypt and anonymize private content that needs protection within (our cloud platform) Amazon Web Services.”

Right now, Kono is offered as a free service to individual users. For corporate clients, the startup presents a paid package that includes additional features like customization and analytics, it said.

Looking ahead, Konolabs hopes to support more languages as well as expand the platforms that Kono supports to include not only email but also mobile messengers and AI-powered smart speakers.

Konolabs was co-founded in 2014 by three Korean engineers with a background in mobile and web services including Min, who worked as a developer at Korea’s Daum Communications for 19 years as one of the portal website’s founding members before establishing her own startup.

The company has so far attracted around $850,000 in seed and angel funding from multiple investors including Silicon Valley accelerator 500 Startups and MashUp Angels. It also won the TechCrunch pitch-off in Seoul in 2016.

By Sohn Ji-young (jys@heraldcorp.com)