If b@corenough.com were not a bot, but the email address of an employee, sending mail to b+xx@corenough.com would lead to directly move it into a mail folder, thanks to sub-adressing explained earlier. In this case, however, there is no physical person managing it, instead, it's a program called timeNough. "b+in" is an alias for "b", and will allow you to control and pilot b@corenough.com, while not making it aware of some exchanges in order to let him deduct time data. When the bot sees the sender has attempted to communicate with him via b+in@corenough.com rather than via b@corenough.com it will act differently, understanding that the sender was trying to make a specific request, whatever the mail subject or its content.

Start your day with a trigger email

You stay in your e-mailbox, and you just give a command to a program called timeNough, which will logically recognize you as the sender of the email and manage your working time on your behalf. Employees often have their emails on their smartphones, with notifications and VPN for secure remote access, so emails can be sent from home when remote working or on site without needing to start a computer. Using the bot, an employee can be recognized with a variety of email addresses as sender, allowing the sending of emails not only from company email addresses, but from personal addresses as well.

You can rest assured that the software behind this email address isn't dumb, or limited like a toy robot, but smart enough to stop the counter if it has not been interrupted after a reasonable delay, or if there is no sign of life from the employee. A configuration about its sensitiveness could even allow it to interact with the employee in some unusual or unexpected cases, by sending him/her a confirmation email after a while, to ask for instance: "Is everything alright?" or "Are you still working?". And in this email, two simple buttons could be present: Yes and No, and if he clicks, he would be redirected to a one-time confirmation page saying for instance "Thank you, this brief answer helps us to understand what's going on".

In three simple steps, timeNough can confirm a situation, correct or adjust its internal timer, its local time data, or produce new data, accordingly. Confirmation emails are sent out every day, like when people register with a new service or app, when they forget their credentials, or after they make a payment. Although they have buttons leading to landing pages, quick interfaces, the main interface remains the e-mailbox, where notifications are received. It's the same principle here, but the landing pages are from the bot b@corenough.com, he prepares and owns them, which helps him better manage his data depending on the employee's reaction.

Using email headers as a powerful tool

The concept of email headers is also an efficient and robust hardening tool for timeNough. Among the benefits of using these bots is the avoidance of authentication for employees, who do not have to enter credentials and log into a separate interface, and do not need to remember passwords. Nevertheless, this recognition is a sensitive matter. How can we ensure that the emails truly come from employees and not from a hacker script pretending to be an employee, and sends emails under the employee's identity, name, email address? A scam acting as if the employee is sending the signals when in fact he did nothing?

Here are the DKIM-Signature headers, which can be read, and they serve as a method for silently authenticating each received email. The first versions of timeNough will never react to signal if these secure pieces of information are invalid. This guarantees that there will be no identity theft, data theft, or security breach for the client company.

As a mirror of the b+in@corenough.com alias, this 3rd bot should be used when it's about piloting timeNough and telling him to stop the stopwatch or the time counter already started: the employee's workday is done, so he goes home. At first, the feature will be as simple as that, but as time goes on, the subject of the email sent to b+out@corenough.com and even its content could be used to give more information to the software hidden in it, such as how the day went? Was it good? Poor? Terrible? Tough? Day after day, our software will consider extra data or meta data as priceless...

What if b+out before b+in or irregular cases

Nevertheless, developers have anticipated this by designing and putting in timeNough source code a wrong-order-cases management algorithm, which is able to understand when the aliases b+in and b+out would be called in the wrong order during a unique working day or even when the one alias would be called multiple times in a row, a non-sense as well. This product will never crash or have inconsistencies in the measurement of working time.

timeNough means also smart enough

By putting that questions-answers-through-email mechanism in place, users, employees, should quickly realize that, after a while, there is no need to repeat, indicate and confirm what was going on each time, because in front of them, in the end, it is a machine, a program. Why not equip it with intelligence and memory, making of the entire concept a bot education? The idea is that each employee will customize and educate the bot to his or her own personal behavior, regardless of whether there is just one same software behind. The goal is to make the bot able to respond and respond to each employee's individual needs.

This alias username consists of b+pause, an email alias for informing timeNough that an employee has gone to pause, and a pause time stopwatch must be started. It a new way to pilot it. Imagine you were in front of your media player and the play sign changed to a pause sign on click. The command follows the two preceding commands: b+in, which is the start of the working time signal for an employee of CoreNough or a client company, and b+out, which is its stop. Here b+pause@corenough.com refers to the occasional interruptions of this working time, not necessarily permanent, but just momentary, temporary.

Instead of a badge movement or click, an email

3 email addresses that control a silent and background program: b+in, b+out, and b+pause may seem overwhelming to someone unfamiliar with the concept. To make matters more challenging, they should be used in a specific order depending on the flow. In accordance with what has been explained previously regarding the Time Clock-in and Time Clock-out aliases, the bot will be clever enough to detect incoherences and inconsistencies. No worries if you send an email to b+pause@corenough.com to indicate a pause, but you haven't sent an email to b+in@corenough.com to notify timeNough you are starting the day, it will figure out that that is not logic, and will do what it needs to do.

If this happens, the hidden software will send you an email informing you that this probably was a mistake, asking you to confirm its understanding through a button, and everything will then be fine. The answer will be considered and stored in its local database, and since machine learning is involved, the bot will autocorrect itself the next time it occurs. The main idea is to have here a central program that can learn from the employees' habits and mistakes. It can measure time, but can also account for the fact that human errors may occur while using it.

Sending an SMS to announce your break

The only bot to be exempt from this feature in the current version of the MVP is Time Logger (b@corenough.com), since it has been designed exclusively to measure and count email exchanges. There is a possibility that the MVP can be controlled by SMS in the future, but for now timeNough believes that putting someone into Copy of a text message is not a regular and standard behavior, even if this is possible on many smartphones today.

The developers of timeNough wanted to take advantage of the most commonly used interface in a company: the e-mailbox. Therefore, they decided to hide the program into multiple email addresses. This new one: b+back@corenough.com is another clever way to control it, to send the controls, an instruction, for a behind-the-scenes action. While in pause, timeNough keeps a stopwatch, which measures how long the employee's pause lasts. To stop that stopwatch, he must see a signal telling him the pause is over. And here we are: b+pause@corenough.com opposite alias.

Have you told anybody or anything you're back?

The idea here is not to tell someone or a colleague that you are back from a pause, in the style of an Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator movie. Instead, you tell something, a software, a living source code: timeNough, ready to listen to you, to take that signal into consideration and take actions, updating internal time data and information. By sending just a blank email to b+pause@corenough.com after the email sent to b+back@corenough.com, the bot will stop a stopwatch about your pause time. Following receipt of the request, he performs some actions. Here again, the order of the sending does not matter, timeNough will detect if it makes no sense to tell him you are back, knowing that you never took a break.

This alias address can be saved as a contacts

By selecting someone already in your agenda, the interface automatically fills in the field with their email address. In the end, it's as if you had a non-human colleague, who you could only communicate with by telling him "Hey, I took a pause", and "Hey, I'm back now", and in your back, that colleague keeps track for you of your pauses, their duration, all that in a small local database. Day after day, month after month, data accumulates as well as behaviors are learned from that data.

For piloting and controlling previous bots, the email does not need a subject and content. Having an email message sent to them lets timeNough, the program hidden in it, recognize the employee as the source and target of the time data, and then recognize the signal for completing a specific activity: clocking in, clocking out, pausing, and returning from a pause. This new bot alias, b+away@corenough.com, requires additional information, since it has a subject of a different topic: the employee's leave days. The goal is still to measure time information about an employee.

Why not plug this bot with existing systems?

It could be an email asking for more details about a days off request, followed by an email describing the request's status and eventual updates, all without leaving the employee's e-mailbox interface. As a smart assistant, able to include all the needed people in the process without requiring them to fill out separate forms. Calls-to-action will be contained within the emails the program will send, and they will include answers, possibilities, and an understanding of what the program needs to do his job.

The bot will not just be used as a stopwatch or a timer, but rather as a gateway, something in the middle, intelligent and clever enough to handle cases where an employee goes on vacation and then returns.

The b+in and b+out aliases, or b+pause and b+back, don't make sense here, since there should just be one alias for handling the whole topic, no matter what the direction or order is. Instead of bothering your colleagues about your days off, you just deal with timeNough and its discrete software, you answer any emails or questions that may be received, and that's it. The bot will figure out all by itself if someone has to be involved at some point, depending on the situation.

Connect it, but not too close...

It was the idea behind timeNough and this MVP that the program be presented in the background, close to the email system, which is sometimes in the cloud or the client company datacenter, rather than on each employee's computer, browser, or webcam. There must be a concrete distance between the person and the monitoring script, and person should trust that nothing will be done without his intent and willing participation.

A new bot alias was designed for the famous situation of an employee who knows he is going to arrive late at work or a meeting, but out of politeness and respect, text or email another member of his team or an employee in order to prevent this embarrassing situation. Keeping in mind that it is not a real person behind the b+late@corenough.com email address, but timeNough, a program with artificial intelligence, you can save precious time for the people supposed to received that kind of message. The bot will serve as an intermediary, dealing and handling this for them, avoiding them from being bothered.

When latecomers should better face bots

Imagine you are talking by emails exchange to a bot that simply asks you "When are you planning to arrive?", or "Should I notify your team?", and in the message there are two buttons: "Yes" or "No," leading you directly to confirmation page on your browser. Crazy, right? As soon as the bot learns that you were supposed to arrive at 8:00 AM or 2:00 PM, but you arrive 30 minutes later, he will store the time data for you internally. At the end of the month or semester, HR personnel or your managers can simply ask the bot to send back the data for reading and analysis, which introduces a new smart way to gather employee time data.

This unique bot alias was introduced with the idea that dealing with latecomers inevitably can be a difficult, counterproductive and energy consuming task for all people around them, from HR to direct team members and managers. Having the ability to directly talk to a machine, deal with it, and let people around out of it, can make everyone more alert, focused, and productive. Regardless of how many times an employee is late on the same day, month or year, regardless of what mechanisms the organization has in place to punish that kind of events, everything is handled through one centralized email address.

One feature in these permanent email and lateral drawers that hasn't been sufficiently discussed is the ability to send text messages instead of email messages to 7 out of the available bots, including this one. Twilio's programmable messaging API allows us to set up one unique phone number for the purpose of this MVP and demo: +1 (862) 305-8560. In order to accomplish this, you must simply type one of the following key words into your SMS and nothing else: " in ", " out ", " pause ", " back ", " away ", " late " and " quant ".

With this last bot alias of the timeNough MVP, you can handle a total of 8 internal email addresses of a single company - in this case, CoreNough LLC, addresses regarded as Lara Bowen's contacts even though they hide behind a single program. Unlike the previous six aliases like b+in, b+out, b+pause, b+back, b+late and b+away, programed to perform time-related operations in the interest of the employee communicating with them, as well as b@corenough.com, the main bot address focus on reading time and typing time, b+quant@corenough.com is here a gateway dedicated to retrieving and delivering the data timeNough may hold in its local database.

Here you can ask and access stored time data

It is based on the fact that, according to timeNough founders and makers, an office worker, regardless of the company's domain, is exposed to a wide variety of different interfaces during the course of his or her day. The mailbox appears to be the main one, and the plan is to remain there with nothing new to deal with. MVP's ultimate bot alias will only quantify and provide time data to those who ask him in the right way. About that way, if you get in touch with b+quant@corenough.com for the first time and have no particular request or even an empty message, the program behind will reply back with a summary of all the working time, pause time, lateness time, leave time, typing time, and reading time you may have stored via the other aliases. With this bot, you'll get access to data that other bots can't provide to you via a simple email signal.

Availability, privacy, and security built in

However, everything will remain private and employee-confidential by default. For instance a staff member A would not have the right to ask time data about a staff member B unless he had the right based on the hierarchy that timeNough should be aware of or until staff member B granted himself permission to do so. Data output should comply with any common sense regulation regarding data privacy.

Finally, because of this bot's internal database being managed and hosted within the company's own infrastructure, storage, and networks, timeNough can be considered a secure solution, never communicating with the outside world, an external API or the cloud. Everything will be local to prevent data theft, and timeNough's makers will not be responsible if the company's system is weak with timeNough's data in it.