This month, I finally downloaded Google’s Gemini app onto my iPhone. A lot of people did this, apparently, because Gemini has been the top free app on Apple’s App Store charts for about a week now.
I took the plunge mainly due to the “nano-banana” image-generation capabilities. I played around with this for a previous AI Playground edition.
Since then, I’ve begun to use the Gemini app for something seemingly simple, but annoyingly fiddly: updating my Google Calendar.
If we’re going to reach AGI or Superintelligence anytime soon, the machines are going to have to sort out the mess that is digital calendars. My first effort with Gemini was hopeful. Here’s how it went down:
I’m in a bocce league that plays Thursday evenings in San Carlos, and my great friend Dave organizes our team. He recently sent around match dates for the new season.
Usually, Dave would painstakingly input every match into his calendar and invite all of us by entering our email addresses into each event. He recently got a fancy new tech job, so he doesn’t have time for this. Instead, he sent us a web link instructing us to “just subscribe to a URL for our bocce calendar.” He then went into a rather in-depth explanation, “for the less tech-savvy among you, which might be all of you given all the boomer @yahoo addresses on this thread.”
For the record, I have a Yahoo email and a Gmail account. However, I did not want to be bothered with all this technical stuff. So, I clicked Dave’s link and took screenshots of the bocce calendar with my iPhone. Then, I opened the Gemini app, uploaded the screenshots, and just told Gemini to “add these events to my Google calendar.”
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The AI app “thought” for a few seconds, linked to my calendar, and just added all the events. It took about 25 seconds. This seemed too good to be true, so I manually checked the times, dates, and locations of several bocce matches. They were all accurate.
It was truly a magical moment. Something that should be simple is finally simple.
This is something Google is uniquely positioned to provide, because it already owns a popular calendar app. Guess who doesn’t offer a calendar? OpenAI.
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