What I Built
Event-Flo is an AI-powered conversational intake system for professional event planners managing complex, multicultural celebrations. I built Event-Flo because a friend of mine would complain they spend half their day just organizing and repeating questions from topics already covered. She expressed the lack of available resources that could help her handle complex events such as Indian weddings with four or five separate events over multiple days. Trying to handle the guest list and which people for what event sounds already like things can slip through the cracks. So I thought why not start the project through this Algolia contest. This project paired perfectly for it because I want to build tools that will help professionals automate all while reaping the benefits from key insights from the analytic side of Algolia.
Demo
How I Used Algolia Agent Studio
Every inquiry that comes through the chat gets turned into a structured object in Algolia. Here's an example:
javascript{
objectID: "inquiry_1738567890",
culture: {
primary: "Indian / South Asian",
types: ["Hindu"]
},
events: {
count: 4,
isMultiDay: true
},
timeline: {
urgency: "high",
year: "2026"
},
budget: {
tier: "premium",
estimatedMin: 85000
},
guestCount: 300,
priorities: ["venue", "food", "cultural_traditions"],
contact: {
email: "priya@example.com"
},
qualificationScore: 9
}
The AI calculates it based on things like event complexity, budget range, and timeline urgency. Higher scores mean higher-value leads that planners should jump on.
When someone says "We're doing an Indian wedding with around 300 guests next summer," the system doesn't just save that text. It parses it:
"Indian wedding" → sets culture type, flags it as likely multi-day
"around 300 guests" → extracts the number 300
"next summer" → calculates urgency based on current date
I built validation into every step. Email addresses get checked with regex. Guest counts have to be actual numbers between 1 and 10,000. Budget ranges get normalized whether someone types "$75k" or "seventy-five thousand dollars."
On the dashboard, I'm using Algolia's InstantSearch React library. The main widgets I used:
SearchBox for full-text search across everything
RefinementList for filtering by culture, budget tier, and urgency
Stats to show how many results matched and how fast
Custom ranking so high-scoring inquiries bubble to the top
What makes this work is faceted search. A planner can stack filters—show me Indian weddings AND premium budget AND high urgency—and Algolia handles all that instantly. No SQL queries running in the background, no loading spinners, just instant results.
I didn't overcomplicate the conversational flow. Eight questions, asked one at a time. Each one is designed to extract a specific piece of data.
Why Fast Retrieval Matters
Honestly, this whole thing lives or dies on speed.
Event planners don't have time to wait. They're reviewing inquiries during their morning coffee, between client calls, sometimes on their phone while sitting in a venue walkthrough.
The speed also enables mobile workflows. Planners can pull up the dashboard on a tablet during a consultation with a client and filter inquiries in real-time without awkward pauses. The interface stays responsive no matter what device you're on. There's something psychological about instant feedback. When you click a filter and the results change immediately, it just feels right. You start exploring the data instead of carefully planning each query because you know it's not going to cost you time.
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