{"id":234885,"date":"2025-07-03T14:06:10","date_gmt":"2025-07-03T14:06:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/234885\/"},"modified":"2025-07-03T14:06:10","modified_gmt":"2025-07-03T14:06:10","slug":"adding-calendar-events-with-a-screenshot-is-ai-at-its-finest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/234885\/","title":{"rendered":"Adding calendar events with a screenshot is AI at its finest"},"content":{"rendered":"

Apple\u2019s AI capabilities have been less than impressive<\/a> to date, but there\u2019s one new feature coming with iOS 26<\/a> that\u2019s actually really handy: adding stuff to your calendar with a screenshot.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been testing this feature out for the past few weeks in the developer beta, and I\u2019m pleased to report that it works, easily making it my favorite Apple Intelligence feature to date. That\u2019s admittedly a low bar to clear \u2014 and it\u2019s not quite as capable as Android\u2019s version \u2014 but boy is it a nice change of pace to use an AI feature on a phone that feels like it\u2019s actually saving me time.<\/p>\n

Maybe adding things to your calendar doesn\u2019t sound all that exciting, but I am a person who is Bad At Calendars. I will confidently add events to the wrong day, put them on the wrong calendar, or forget to add them at all. Not my finest quality.<\/p>\n

The iOS version of \u201cuse AI to add things to your calendar\u201d taps into Visual Intelligence. iOS 18 included the ability to create calendar events based on photos, and now iOS 26 is extending that to anything on your screen. You just take a screenshot and a prompt will appear with the words \u201cAdd to calendar.\u201d Tap it, and after a few moments you\u2019ll see a preview of the event to be added with the top-level details. You can tap to edit the event or just create it if everything looks good and you\u2019re ready to move on with your life.<\/p>\n

None of this would be useful if it didn\u2019t work consistently; thankfully, it does. I\u2019ve yet to see it hallucinate the wrong day, time, or location for an event \u2014 though it didn\u2019t account for a timezone difference in one case. For the most part though, everything goes on my calendar as it should, and I rejoice a little bit every time it saves me a trip to the calendar app. The only limitation I\u2019ve come across is that it can\u2019t create multiple events from a screenshot. It kind of just lands on the first one it sees and suggests an event based on that. If you want that kind of functionality from your AI, you\u2019ll need an Android phone.<\/p>\n

Gemini Assistant has been able to add events based on what\u2019s on your screen since August of last year<\/a>, and in January it added support for Samsung Calendar<\/a>. To access it, you can summon Google Assistant and tap an icon that says \u201cAsk about screen.\u201d Gemini creates a screenshot that it references, then you just type or speak your prompt to have it add the event to your calendar. This has failed to work for me as recently as a couple of months ago, but it\u2019s miles better now.<\/p>\n

I gave Gemini Assistant on the Pixel 9 Pro the task of adding a bunch of preschool events to my calendar all listed at the end of an email \u2014 and it created an event for every one of them on the correct day. In a separate case, it also clocked that the events I was adding were listed in Eastern Time and accounted for that difference. In some instances it even fills in a description for the event based on text on the screen. I also used Gemini in Google Calendar on my laptop, because Gemini is always lurking around the corner when you use literally any Google product, and it turned a list of school closure dates into calendar events. <\/p>\n

This is great and all, but is this just an AI-rebranding of some existing feature? As far as I can tell, not exactly. Versions of this feature already existed on both platforms, but in a much more basic form. On my Apple Intelligence-less iPhone 13 Mini, you can tap on a date in an email for an option to add it to your calendar. But it uses the email subject line as the event title; a decent starting point, but adding five events to my calendar with the heading \u201cPreschool July Newsletter\u201d isn\u2019t ideal. Android will also prompt you to add an event to your calendar from a screenshot, but it frequently gets dates and times wrong. AI does seem to be better suited for this particular task, and I\u2019m ready to embrace it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Apple\u2019s AI capabilities have been less than impressive to date, but there\u2019s one new feature coming with iOS…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":234886,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3163],"tags":[323,1662,1942,1665,547,326,53,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-234885","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-apple","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-ios","12":"tag-mobile","13":"tag-tech","14":"tag-technology","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114789691304918197","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234885","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=234885"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234885\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/234886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}