A simple way to turn verbal family plans into Google Calendar events with AI

Good morning, it’s まさきん.

I’ve written before about scanning school handouts and adding them to a calendar. But plans reach our family in plenty of forms besides printed handouts.

For example, a message might just show up in the family LINE group: “next month’s sports day starts at 9am on 10/25.” This time I want to write about turning that kind of spoken or chat-based plan straight into a calendar entry.

Nobody actually “registers” plans shared by word of mouth

A printed handout is a physical object, so at least you don’t forget it exists. Plans shared by voice or LINE are different.

Sometimes a kid just says, “open house is next Wednesday,” and that’s the end of it. A relative’s phone call about a get-together disappears just as easily if nobody jots it down.

Everyone assumes someone else will remember, and in the end nobody formally adds it anywhere. That kind of plan is more common than you’d think.

I’ve also had plenty of cases where I thought I’d added something to my own phone, but it never made it onto my spouse’s calendar. Family plans only become truly shared once someone actually does the work of registering them. I felt the same thing when I wrote about blocking out our weekday schedule: unless you build a system where sharing happens automatically from the start, everything ends up depending on one person’s memory.

With a paper handout, you can always go back and reread it. Spoken or chat-based information gets fuzzier the longer you wait. That’s exactly why I wanted a way to deal with it the moment I hear it.

Just tell the AI, and let it build the link

So here’s what I do: I tell an AI assistant the plan out loud, in plain language, and have it build a Google Calendar registration link. No OCR, no scanning required.

Google Calendar has a way to open the event-creation screen using nothing but URL parameters. Google doesn’t advertise this widely, but there’s a community-maintained document listing the event-creation URL parameters that makes the spec easy to follow. I have the AI assemble a URL in this format, and registering the event is as simple as tapping the finished link.

https://www.google.com/calendar/render?action=TEMPLATE
  &text=(event name, URL-encoded)
  &dates=20261025T090000/20261025T120000
  &location=(location, URL-encoded)
  &details=(details, URL-encoded)

Here’s what each parameter means:

• text: The event name. If it includes non-ASCII characters, it needs URL encoding
• dates: Start and end date/time, in “YYYYMMDDTHHmmSS” format, joined by a slash
• location: The venue. This also needs encoding if it includes non-ASCII characters or spaces
• details: Extra notes. It’s handy to record who told you about the plan, for when you look back later

The actual steps are really simple

Here’s all I do, in three steps:

1. Tell the AI the plan exactly as I heard it (something like, “sports day, next month on 10/25, starts at 9am, at Such-and-Such Elementary”)
2. Ask it to “make a link I can use to add this to Google Calendar”
3. Tap the resulting link, check the details, and save it

As long as the date, time, and location come through, the AI handles the URL encoding and date-format conversion. I never have to sit there cross-referencing an encoding chart myself.

What the exchange actually looks like

What I tell the AI can be completely unstructured, plain Japanese or English. Something like this:

“Next month’s sports day, 9am to noon on October 25th. At Such-and-Such Elementary’s schoolyard. Heard it from my kid today.”

That’s enough. The AI converts the date and time into YYYYMMDDTHHmmSS format, encodes anything that needs it, and packages the whole thing into one link. Even if the details come out of order, the AI sorts through them, so there’s no need to painstakingly rewrite a tidy note first.

If the end time isn’t clear yet, I just add something like “details to be confirmed on the day,” and it lands right in the details parameter. Registering with a placeholder time and updating it once the official notice arrives works perfectly well as a routine.

I usually do this kind of exchange from my phone while out and about. An unstable connection turns into a small but real source of frustration in that moment.

Why this works so well for word-of-mouth plans

This method is especially suited to plans that never leave a paper trail: school events a kid mentions out loud, an invitation from a relative’s phone call, a notice that flows through a LINE group and then just sits there, read but unregistered.

I’ve found that turning this kind of information into a link the moment I hear it is by far the most reliable approach. If I try to recall it later, I usually can’t remember the exact time or place.

OCR-ing printed handouts was about how to process paper that gets handed to you. This link-generation trick is a slightly different entry point: how to preserve information you only heard. Combining both means fewer things slip through the cracks, regardless of which channel they arrive through.

No app installation is needed either, so it works on any device with a browser. Telling my phone what I just heard from my kid and tapping a link to finish is, honestly, easier than I expected.

Where this comes in especially handy

• When a kid brings home word of a school event and you want to register it on the spot, before you forget
• When plans with relatives or friends get settled over the phone or in passing conversation
• When a plan posted in the family LINE group risks getting buried under “read” status without ever being acted on

What all of these have in common is that the plan vanishes unless someone writes it down. The whole point of this setup is to hand that note-taking chore off to an AI.

Information you can OCR from a printed handout, and information that only survives by voice or chat. Family plans arrive as a mix of both. Automating just one side still leaves the other slipping through, so combining the two feels like the realistic approach.

Wrap-up

I’ve shared a setup where you tell an AI a plan exactly as you heard it, spoken or from a chat, and have it turn that into a Google Calendar link. Once you know the URL format, the rest is something you can hand off to the AI entirely.

The small tasks we tend to put off are often the ones that get done shockingly fast once you hand them to AI. Reviewing your phone plan might be one of those same small, easy-to-postpone tasks.

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