Adding an event to your Google Calendar based on an email invite is fairly simple as you only need to respond to the invitation by selecting ‘Yes’, ‘No’, or ‘Maybe’. If the email is not a Google Calendar invite, you would have to manually add the event and the accompanying details to your calendar – which can be time-consuming as it is roughly a six-step process. But what if an AI bot could take care of it for you?
An AI bot called Fwd2cal can go over any email that discusses an appointment and automatically add it to your Google Calendar. The open-source project was made by developer Moe Adham and is currently free of charge.
“I wrote it because I was really frustrated managing many different email addresses on different platforms into a single calendar […] It also seemed like a task that machine learning could maybe do reliably,” Adham said.
Fwd2cal has been built on top of a combination of tools offered by Google Cloud and SendGrid. The bot uses OpenAI’s ChatGPT to parse emails and turn the relevant bits of information such as date and time into an event or appointment on your Google Calendar. Follow these steps to use the service.
– First, send an email to calendar@fwd2cal.com.
– You will get a reply asking you to let the bot access your Google Calendar through a link. Once you have authorised the bot to make changes to your calendar, you can start using the service.
– If you receive an email that discusses an appointment, forward it to calendar@fwd2cal.com.
– The bot will scan the contents of the email, turn it into a calendar appointment, and add it to your Google Calendar.
If you want the event to be given a specific name, you can include it as an instructional prompt in the same email. To add more than one email address, write add before the second email address in the subject line and send it to calendar@fwd2cal.com.
While fwd2cal looks to eliminate the task of adding calendar events manually with just one click, it requires users to put their trust in the bot service. Its privacy policy states, “Emails and events are processed by AI, but never stored to ensure your privacy. No details are stored, or logged.”
The only data that fwd2cal stores is your email addresses and does not store the email addresses of users mentioned in forwarded emails, it adds. The backend code of the project is easily accessible for review by other developers as it is distributed under an open-source licence.
It is unclear if the bot can be used to delete or modify event details on Google Calendar once the event has been created. It is also unclear if the service allows for events to be added to Microsoft Outlook Calendar or other calendars.
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