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It is something that we We all do it several times a week: manually adding things to our calendar while copying details from an email. What if a bot could do that job for you?
That’s the idea behind Fwd2cala currently free project Moe Adham which can scan any email with an appointment and automatically add it to your calendar. If you receive an email with a possible calendar appointment (a party invitation, a meeting, a coworker casually mentioning that he can join them for drinks today after work), you can forward it to the free bot. The service uses ChatGPT to analyze email and find the relevant information, then convert that information into a calendar appointment, and 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 in one calendar,” Adham writes on the project website. “It also seemed like a task that machine learning could perhaps perform 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 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 will receive a response message, with a link, asking you to authorize your Google Calendar. You can add more email addresses by sending another email to the service; Simply type “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 that’s happening – the bot will parse the email, convert it to a calendar appointment, and then add it to your Google Calendar. If something goes wrong, you will receive an email explaining it. Otherwise, the service will continue to silently add appointments to your calendar. You can even include instructions in the email, if you wish, using the same phrase you would use to talk to any AI chatbot. I found the bot to be pretty good at figuring out what you want.
All of this requires a lot of trust in Adham, which he acknowledges on the website. The good news is that the project is distributed under an open source license, which means that The code is available online. if you want to review it. He Privacy Policy It also makes it clear that the only information the bot collects is that necessary to provide the service and that no personal information is stored long-term or used to train the AI model. The service runs with a combination of tools from Google Cloud, OpenAI and SendGrid.
Fwd2cal is free, although that 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.
