This bot automatically adds events to your calendar. Just email it to us

That’s something we’re about we all do it several times a week: we manually add things to our calendar, copying details from email. What if a bot could do it for you?

That’s the idea Fwd2calcurrently a free design by Moe Adham which can analyze any email containing a meeting and automatically add it to your calendar. If you receive an email with a potential calendar appointment – an invitation to a party, a meeting, a co-worker randomly mentioning that you can join them for drinks after work today – you can forward it to the free bot. The service uses ChatGPT to parse emails and find relevant bits of information, then turn that information into a calendar appointment and then add that appointment to Google Calendar.

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

I’ve been testing this for a few weeks, and so far I agree: it’s something machine learning can do reliably. The service couldn’t be easier to apply, and the setup process isn’t too tough. All you need to do is send an email to calendar@fwd2cal.com. You will receive a reply message with a link asking you to authorize Google Calendar. You can add more email addresses by sending another email to the service – just type “add” followed by your second email address in the subject line and you’re done.

Once you connect Fwd2cal to your Google Calendar, you can start using the service. You can forward any email that mentions an event – the bot will analyze the message, turn it into a calendar event, and then add it to your Google Calendar. If something goes wrong, you will receive an email with an explanation. If not, the service will silently add meetings to your calendar. If you want, you can even attach instructions to the email, using the same wording you would apply in a conversation with any AI chatbot. I found the bot to be quite good at figuring out what you want.

All this requires a lot of trust in Adham, as he admits on his website. The good news is that the project is distributed under an open source license, which means the code is available online if you want to review it. The privacy policy also explains that the bot only collects information necessary to provide the service and that no personal data is stored long-term or used to train the artificial intelligence model. The service runs on a combination of tools from Google Cloud, OpenAI and SendGrid.

Fwd2cal is free, although this may change. “If this ever becomes too popular and too expensive to run, I may start charging for it,” Adham writes on the website. Meanwhile, it is a service that offers great convenience.