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If you’ve always wanted to say you have “people” to attend your meetings, there’s an app in development for that, as long as you’re comfortable with the idea of eventually sending an AI bot in your place and potentially offending your human colleagues.
MeetTwins, from Indian developer Aditya Shinde, is an AI assistant currently recruiting users for its beta. It’s designed for a single purpose: to attend Google Meet calls on behalf of its operator and relay approved information to colleagues without requiring its human to spend precious time actually speaking to coworkers.
Shinde describes the tool on its website as being inspired by his own desire to send an AI bot to his Google Meet calls, an idea he instead decided to develop into an actual product built using AI models from India-based AI firm Sarvam, and with the ability to add a digital twin avatar created by Simli. Use cases described on MeetTwins’ website include status update meetings, students who have to juggle work with class, and even sales and customer teams who need to handle routine check-in calls with clients, though we don’t advise that for businesses who want their customers to feel like they care about them.
Prepping MeetTwins for a call involves telling it what questions to answer, providing documents or files participants may request, and supplying other context it may need. Certain topics can be designated off limits for the discussion as well. Shinde told The Register in a LinkedIn conversation that it’s solely designed to answer questions that were approved by its user, and that it won’t guess, make anything up, or promise something that a human ought to have final say on.
“If a prospect asks something that isn’t covered in the brief, MeetTwins will not try to improvise,” Shinde told us. Anything outside the defined realm of discussion is instead referred to MeetTwins’ operator, who receives an email after the call summarizing the things that were discussed and any open items to address.
Let’s be frank for a moment: No one wants to be stuck in a boring Google Meet call that could have been an email – an argument for which MeetTwins, ironically, provides even further justification – but deciding to send an AI representative on your behalf isn’t likely to engender feelings of camaraderie or support from one’s coworkers. Shinde admitted he’s aware of that and has built features into MeetTwins to account for that very situation.
“We are very conscious of this,” Shinde noted. “If anyone in the meeting is uncomfortable, they can simply type “/stop” in the chat, and MeetTwins will leave immediately.”
In other words, there’s a distinct possibility that colleagues upset they had to engage with an AI instead of their coworker will simply eject the bot and send a grumpy email after the meeting asking for whatever information you were going to provide, potentially CC’ing a supervisor on that note, too.
Shinde said that clearly labeling the MeetTwins bot as an AI in the call, and announcing it when it first speaks, “actually builds trust,” though we imagine that might not be the case with those who are skeptical of AI.
A good use of AI? That’s up for debate, but it does prove one thing: We’re all wasting a lot of time in virtual meetings that could probably just be an email or a Slack message – preferably one penned by an actual human whose busy schedule might not have any spare time. ®
