Calendar and time management on Iphone

Hey everyone,

I’m currently in the process of building a small iPhone app for myself. The basic idea came from something that has been bothering me for a while: I feel like calendar and time management on the iPhone could be much more efficient, at least for the way I work.

Right now I often try to use Siri to add appointments. Sometimes it works great, but when Siri doesn’t understand what I mean, I end up spending more time fixing things than if I had just added the event manually. And editing things in the Calendar app with VoiceOver can also take quite a bit of time. Lots of scrolling, dictating, sliding through fields, adjusting dates and times, and so on.

So I decided to build my own solution. The goal is an app that lets me add and manage appointments much faster using natural language and voice.

The app will automatically add appointments to the calendar, bypassing siri and manual editting. So, it is not a new calendar app, but rather a bridge that makes the use of the Iphone Calendar app much easyer.

Initially this was purely for my own use, but while working on it I thought: maybe this could actually be useful for other people as well. It will be released on the App Store anyway, it might make sense to include features that others would find helpful.

So I’m curious: is there anything related to calendars, reminders, or time management that you wish worked better on iOS?

Below is what i'm working on so far for the app.

The core idea is that the app should let you create and edit appointments using natural language, either by dictation or by importing text from messages.

For example, I could say something like:
“I have a dentist appointment on March 25 from 12 PM to 1 PM,”
and the app would automatically detect the date, time, and title, then ask for confirmation before saving it to the calendar.

Here are the main features I’m planning:

Quick capture of appointments
You open the app and immediately dictate or paste something like:
“Meeting tomorrow at 2 PM,” or
“Doctor March 25 from 12 to 1.”
The app parses the text and shows the detected event for confirmation before saving it.

Conversation-style mode
There will also be an optional conversational mode where the app talks back to you using a natural voice. So it might say something like:
“I found one appointment: dentist on March 25 from 12 to 1. Would you like to save it?”
You could then say things like:
“Add location,”
“Change the time to 1 PM,” or
“Make it repeat every Thursday.”

Importing text from messages
If someone sends something like “Let’s meet the next four Thursdays at 2 PM,” you could copy or share that text to the app. The app would detect that it represents multiple appointments and create all of them, again asking for confirmation first.

Multiple appointment detection
If a message contains several dates, for example “April 3, April 10, April 17 and April 24 from 9 AM to 12 PM,” the app should be able to generate several events automatically.

Natural language editing
Instead of manually navigating fields, you could just say something like:
“Change the time to 3:30 PM,”
“Add location London,”
or
“Rename to dentist appointment.”

Accessibility-first design
The app will be designed with VoiceOver users in mind from the start. The idea is to avoid long chains of navigation and make common tasks much faster.

Confirmation before saving
The app will never silently add events. It will always read back or display what it found and ask you to confirm before saving anything to your calendar.

Those are the main ideas so far. Again, I originally started this just to solve my own frustrations with adding and editing events quickly, but if I’m building it anyway, I’d love to hear if there are things that would make it more useful for others too.

So if you have any thoughts about calendar workflows, things you find slow or annoying in the current apps, or features you wish existed, I’d be really interested to hear them.