Overlap launches to automate the process of finding the best time for that meeting

Really, though, does anyone actually enjoy going back and forth with someone to find a good time to talk? The answer is no.

Which is why some startups have been building robots to automate that tedious procedure.

Today marks the launch of another startup working on this, Overlap.

Owen Davis, a cofounder and partner at AlphaPrime Ventures and NYC Seed, believes Overlap can do the job better than other tools out there now, including X.ai‘s Amy personal assistant and Clara Labs‘ competing Clara.

So NYC Seed, along with Avalon Ventures and Genacast Ventures, have backed Overlap — whose name refers to, duh, the time when people’s schedules overlap.

When my schedule overlapped with Davis’ schedule last week, he gave me a guided tour, after making the general point that he’s sick of playing tag, or perhaps finding available times and then directing people to that information after throwing it on the Internet.

“We basically said there needs to be a lot more intelligence built into this,” he said.

Davis went on to show me Overlap in action. He wrote me an email saying, “Let’s meet next week at my office,” making sure to cc Overlap (invite@overlap.com). In less than a minute, Overlap came back with a few available slots listed in the body of the email. I could click on those times to see about reserving them. Or I could click a link to a page on Overlap’s site where I could see all open slots coming up on Davis’ calendar for several days.

From there, I could push a button and overlay my own calendar on top and see what times might work for the both of us. Once I selected a time, I got a Google calendar invitation.

This method goes beyond X.ai’s Amy, for one, because Amy “uploads the work to the guest” after automatically finding time slots that are available for the meeting’s host, Davis said. That “sort of partially defeats the purpose,” he added.

The New York and San Francisco-based Overlap team has so far cooked up an integration with Google Calendar. Support for Apple’s iOS and Mac calendar clients and Microsoft Exchange and Outlook are all on the way, Davis said.

And the technological development won’t stop there.

“We’ll get better at being able to detect more and more things and interpret more and more things in email itself,” Davis said.

Overlap soon enough will be able to identify locations users refer to in emails, once users have loaded locations into the system.

“We will then start prioritizing where meetings should be and grouping them by location as well,” Davis said.

Those using Google Calendar can sign up for the beta version of Overlap here.