The fwd2cal bot automatically adds events to your calendar. Just forward it by email

This is something that we everyone does several times a week: we manually add things to our calendar while copying details from email. What if a bot could do this job for you?

That’s the idea behind Fwd2calcurrently a free project by Mo Adam 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 appointment on your calendar—a party invitation, a meeting, a colleague casually mentioning that you can join them for drinks after work today—you can forward it to the free bot. The service uses ChatGPT to analyze the 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 one calendar,” Adam writes on the project’s website. “It also seemed like a task that machine learning could perform reliably.”

I’ve been testing this for a few weeks now, and so far I agree: it’s something machine learning can reliably do. The service couldn’t be easier to use and the setup process isn’t too difficult. All you have to do is send an email to calendar@fwd2cal.com. 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 good to go.

Once you connect Fwd2cal to your Google calendar, you can start using the service. You can forward any email that mentions an upcoming event – the bot will analyze the email, turn it into a calendar appointment, then add it to your Google calendar. If something goes wrong, you’ll get an email with an explanation. If not, the service will quietly continue to add appointments to your calendar. You can even include instructions in the email if you want, using the same phrase you would use to talk to any AI chatbot. I found the bot to be pretty good at understanding what you want.

All of this takes a lot of trust in Adam, which he admits on the 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 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 works with a combination of tools from Google Cloud, OpenAI and SendGrid.

Fwd2cal is free, but this is subject to change. “If this ever gets too popular and costs too much, I might start charging for it,” Adam wrote on the website. Meanwhile, it is a service that offers great convenience.