Event-Flo: AI-Powered Event Planning

Source: Dev.to

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 complained she spends half her day just organizing and repeating questions that have already been covered. She highlighted the lack of resources for handling complex events such as Indian weddings with four or five separate events over multiple days. Managing the guest list and assigning guests to specific events can easily slip through the cracks. I decided to start the project through the Algolia contest, which aligned perfectly with my goal of building tools that help professionals automate while leveraging Algolia’s analytic insights.

Demo

https://event-flo.vercel.app/

How I Used Algolia Agent Studio

Every inquiry that comes through the chat is turned into a structured object in Algolia. Here’s an example:

{
  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 the qualificationScore based on factors such as event complexity, budget range, and timeline urgency. Higher scores indicate higher‑value leads that planners should prioritize.

When someone says, “We’re doing an Indian wedding with around 300 guests next summer,” the system parses the input:

• “Indian wedding” → sets culture type, flags it as likely multi‑day
• “around 300 guests” → extracts the number 300
• “next summer” → calculates urgency based on the current date

Validation is built into every step:

• Email addresses are checked with regex.
• Guest counts must be numeric values between 1 and 10,000.
• Budget ranges are normalized (e.g., “$75k” or “seventy‑five thousand dollars”).

On the dashboard I use Algolia’s InstantSearch React library. The main widgets include:

• SearchBox – full‑text search across all inquiries.
• RefinementList – filtering by culture, budget tier, and urgency.
• Stats – displays the number of results and response time.
• Custom ranking – ensures high‑scoring inquiries bubble to the top.

Faceted search makes this work: a planner can stack filters—e.g., “Indian weddings AND premium budget AND high urgency”—and Algolia returns results instantly, without SQL queries or loading spinners.

The conversational flow is simple: eight questions, asked one at a time, each designed to extract a specific piece of data.

Why Fast Retrieval Matters

Speed is critical. Event planners don’t have time to wait. They review inquiries during their morning coffee, between client calls, or on their phones while walking through a venue. Fast retrieval also enables mobile workflows: planners can pull up the dashboard on a tablet during a client consultation and filter inquiries in real‑time without awkward pauses. The interface remains responsive across devices, providing instant feedback that encourages exploration rather than careful, time‑consuming query planning.