it’s ours Everyone does it multiple times a week. Add items to your calendar manually while copying details from the email. What if a bot could do that work for you?
This is the idea behind Fwd2cal, a currently free project by Moe Adham. Fwd2cal can parse emails containing events and automatically add them to your calendar. If you receive an email that might contain a calendar event (a party invitation, a meeting, a coworker casually asking you to go for drinks after work today), you can forward it to the free bot. Masu. The service uses ChatGPT to parse your email, find relevant information, turn that information into a calendar event, and add the calendar event to Google Calendar.
“I wrote this because I was really frustrated with having to manage different email addresses on different platforms in one calendar,” Adham writes on the project’s website. “This also seemed like a task that machine learning could definitely do.”
I’ve been testing this for a few weeks and so far I agree that this is something that can definitely be done with machine learning. 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 [email protected]. You’ll receive a message back with a link asking you to approve your Google Calendar. You can add more email addresses by sending another email to the service. Just type “Add” in the subject line followed by a second email address and you’re done.
You can start using the service by connecting Fwd2cal to your Google Calendar. You can forward an email mentioning an event occurring. The bot parses the email, converts it into a calendar event, and adds it to Google Calendar. If something goes wrong, you’ll receive an email explaining it. Otherwise, the service will silently continue adding events to your calendar. If you wish, you can also include instructions in your email using the same phrases you would use when talking to the AI chatbot. It turns out that bots are very good at understanding what users want.
This requires a lot of faith in Adham, which he admits on his website. Fortunately, the project is distributed under an open source license and is available online if you want to check out the code. The privacy policy also makes clear that the bot collects only the information necessary to provide its services, and that no personal information is stored long-term or used to train AI models. The service is powered by a combination of tools from Google Cloud, OpenAI, and SendGrid.
Fwd2cal is free, but is subject to change. “If this becomes too popular and costs too much to run, we will probably start charging,” Adham wrote on his website. In such a situation, it is a very convenient service.
