What an AI family calendar assistant can actually answer
An assistant is only as good as the calendars behind it: it can answer "when is everyone free on Saturday?" only if it can see everyone's Saturday. Most of what people want from one — who is collecting, when the lesson is, whether anyone is free — is a question about the household's week rather than a question about language.
This page is about what such an assistant can answer once it has the week, what it should not be allowed to do, and how ours works.
The questions worth asking one
Four kinds come up again and again in a household:
- What is on. "What do I have tomorrow?" "What is on this weekend?"
- Where somebody has to be. "When is the swimming lesson?" "Who is collecting on Thursday?"
- Whether anyone is free. "When are we all free this weekend?" "Is anyone free at 5 on Friday?"
- Finding one thing. "When was the dentist?" — a search by name, across the calendars you are allowed to see.
None of these are hard questions. They are hard to answer only because the information is spread across four calendars in three apps, and because the person asking is usually driving, cooking or already late.
What it has to be told first
An assistant answering those questions needs the week from every person in the household, which means the calendars people actually use rather than a new one they have to fill in. It also needs to know who is asking: "when am I free" and "when is Mum free" are different questions, and so is what each person is allowed to see of the other.
That last part is the one to check in any product. An assistant that can read every calendar in full can also repeat, to anyone who asks, the title of the meeting you would rather it did not.
What it should not do
Two limits are worth insisting on.
It should not write without being asked. Moving an event affects other people, and "I have moved football to Thursday" is not something to discover afterwards. A proposal you confirm is the right shape.
It should not do the arithmetic itself. Recurring events, time zones and the days clocks change are exactly where a language model is unreliable. Those belong to the calendar engine, with the model reading the result.
How Alfie's assistant works
Alfie is our product. Every person connects the accounts they already use — Google Calendar, Microsoft 365 and Outlook.com, iCloud through an app-specific password, or any CalDAV server — and the household's week is made of those calendars. The assistant answers from that week.
It answers the four kinds of question above, and it can propose adding, moving or cancelling something: the proposal appears in the chat as a card, and nothing is written to a calendar until you confirm it. Dates and recurrence are worked out by the calendar itself, not by the model.
What it may see is what you may see. Sharing is set per calendar for the whole household — Full details, Busy only or Hidden — and a calendar marked as a work calendar starts at busy only. Asked whether you are free on Thursday at five, the assistant can say you are busy; it cannot say what the meeting is, because the title of a busy-only calendar never reaches the person asking.
It also looks ahead. Alfie checks the next two weeks for four things — two events at once, a child who needs accompanying while no adult is free, not enough time between two places, and anything against a household rule such as a bedtime — and each person gets a summary of their day at an hour they choose, or none if they turn it off.
It answers in the language the app is in: English, Chinese, Spanish, French, German or Japanese. The model behind it is a third-party large language model; what is sent to it is the conversation so far and the entries looked up to answer it, already filtered by what the person asking is allowed to see — never a whole calendar history, and never a calendar the household has not shared with them. That data is not used to train the model.
It does not book restaurants, buy tickets or do anything else outside the calendar.
To try it, create a household, connect one calendar each, and ask it what is on tomorrow. It takes about ten minutes, and Alfie is free to use, assistant included.