The fwd2cal Bot adds events to your calendar automatically. Just send an email

It’s something we everyone does it several times a week: we manually add things to our calendar while copying details from an email. What if a bot could do this job for you?

Here’s the idea behind it Fwd2cala currently free project from Moe Adham which can analyze any email with an appointment in it and automatically add it to your calendar. If you get an email with a potential calendar appointment in it—an invitation to a party, a meeting, a coworker casually saying you can join them for drinks after work today—you can forward it to the free bot. The service uses ChatGPT to analyze email and find relevant pieces of information, then turn that information into a calendar appointment, then add that calendar appointment to your Google Calendar.

“I wrote it because I was really frustrated with managing many different email addresses on different platforms in a single calendar,” Adham writes on the project’s website. “It also seemed like a task that machine learning could possibly do reliably.”

I’ve been testing this for a couple of weeks, and so far I agree: This is something machine learning can do reliably. The service could not be easier to use, and the installation process is not too difficult. All you have to do is send an email to [email protected]. You will receive a message back, with a link, asking you to authorize your Google Calendar. You can add more email addresses by sending another email to the service – just put “add” followed by your second email address in the subject line and you’re done.

After connecting Fwd2cal to your Google Calendar, you can start using the service. You can forward any email that mentions an event happening – the bot will analyze the email, turn it into a calendar appointment, then add it to your Google Calendar. If something goes wrong, you will receive an email explaining it. If not, the service will continue to silently add appointments to your calendar. You can even include instructions in the email if you want, using the same phrase you’d use to talk to any AI chatbot. I found the bot to be pretty good at figuring out what you want.

All this requires a lot of trust in Adham, which he acknowledges on the website. The good news is that the project is distributed with an open source license, ie the code is available online if you want to review it. U privacy policy it also makes clear that the only information the bot collects is what is needed to provide the service and that no personal information is stored long-term or used to train the AI ​​model. The service runs on a combination of tools from Google Cloud, OpenAI and SendGrid.

Fwd2cal is free, although it could change. “If this ever gets too popular and costs too much to run, maybe I’ll start charging for it,” Adham writes on the website. Meanwhile, it is a service that offers great convenience.