The Bot fwd2cal Adds Events to Your Calendar Automatically. Just Forward It an Email

December 12, 2024:

It’s something we all do multiple times a week: We manually add things to our calendar while copying details over from an email. What if a bot could do that work for you?

That’s the idea behind Fwd2cal, a currently free project by Moe Adham that can parse 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—a party invitation, a meeting, a coworker casually mentioning you can join them for drinks after work today—you can forward it to the free bot. The service uses ChatGPT to parse the email and find the relevant bits 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 managing many different email addresses on different platforms into a single calendar,” Adham writes on the project’s website. “It also seemed like a task that machine learning could maybe do reliably.”

I’ve been testing this for a couple weeks, and so far I agree: This is something machine learning can do reliably. The service couldn’t be easier to use, and the setup process isn’t too difficult. All you need to do is send an email to calendar@fwd2cal.com. You’ll get 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 mentioning an event happening—the bot will parse the email, turn it into a calendar appointment, then add it to your Google Calendar. If something goes wrong, you’ll get an email explaining that. If not, the service will quietly keep adding appointments to your calendar. You can even include instructions in the email, if you want, using the same phrasing you would use to talk to any AI chatbot. I’ve found the bot is pretty good at figuring out what you want.

This all requires putting 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, meaning the code is available online if you want to review it. The privacy policy also makes it clear that the only information the bot collects is what’s necessary 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, though that might change. “If this ever gets too popular and it costs too much to run, I’ll maybe start charging for it,” Adham writes on the website. In the meantime, it’s a service that offers some great convenience.

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