Artificial Intelligence Meets Ancient Ritual in New Wedding Planning Software

Pleasant Hill, TN (PRWEB) September 23, 2004 -

notch software for organizing weddings and related events, is now releasing a product that uses advanced artificial intelligence to allow their software to understand – of all things –etiquette for weddings! “It might seem strange to use these super-advanced techniques to produce software that can think like an old-fashioned lady from your local church, but we think our customers are going to love it,” says company president Stacy Smyth. “After all, why has tax preparation software become so popular? Because taxes involve a bunch of complicated rules that everybody wants to get right, but very few people want to learn. For a lot of our customers, the formal etiquette used to word invitations, address envelopes, and all the rest of the process is very much the same way.”

The program uses artificial intelligence (A.I.) for a lot of different aspects of etiquette, but one of the best examples is the “expert system” that automatically creates the wording for invitations. The wedding planning software asks the user questions about their wedding plans, and then, based on the specific situation (A couple hosting their own wedding, which will be outside, at the residence of a friend, at a particular time, etc.) the software use the classic, formal rules of etiquette to produce invitation wording which takes into account all of the factors, and is still elegant and proper. “You could figure out how to do it yourself from etiquette books - but for a first-timer, some of the possible situations could take an awful lot of head-scratching.” And, of course, the wording suggested by the software is just a suggestion – if the user wants to be creative, it gives them a starting place that’s sure to be “proper”.

In addition to using an expert system for wording invitations, the wedding planning software also handles an issue that for many brides and grooms is their largest etiquette headache: figuring out what to call their guests on the invitation envelopes. “The husband and wife have different last names. How should their names read on the invitation? She’s a retired air force colonel and he’s just plain ‘Mr.’ How do their names read? He’s a judge, she’s a lawyer. How do their names read? The list goes on and on.” says Mr. Smyth. “This software just flat-out handles it, with no hassles for the user, period. It eliminates time wasted looking up the rules in etiquette books.”

Besides obvious etiquette issues, the software also handles a variety of problems that are more subtle. Take this situation: The bride already has an address book on her computer, and she imports it into the wedding planning software. Some addresses in the guest list read something like “85 St. James St. N.E.” For formal invitations, the addresses on the envelopes should not contain abbreviations. Either the customer is going to have to retype all of the addresses in the address book, or the software needs to understand that “85 St. James St. N.E.” should be printed as “Eighty-five St. James Street Northeast” on the envelope. What’s so difficult about that? “Look again at that example,” says Mr. Smyth “How is the software supposed to know that the first ‘St.’ is saint, which should not be expanded, but the second ‘St.’ is street, which should? To transfer addresses from the address book to the envelopes properly takes common sense, and we know how computers are with common sense. ”Can the software handle it? “Absolutely. In fact, once that part of the artificial intelligence package was up and running, we discovered it had some capabilities we hadn’t foreseen – for example, the software figured out that a street address ending in “LA CT” means “Louisiana Court”, but a street address ending in “CT LA” means “Connecticut Lane”. We were pretty impressed.”

So, what about those lilac-colored invitations with dancing cherubs in the margin? “Sorry.” say Mr. Smyth “When it comes to figuring out if your invitation stationery is in good taste, you’re still going to have to talk with your aunt Martha.”

Organizers for Us produces top-notch wedding planning software designed to make it faster and easier to organize weddings and related events, from the simple to the spectacular. We strive to create software that does more than just store and retrieve information – we make software that gets things done.

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