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ZDNET Highlights
- Apple’s Add to Calendar lets you create events from screenshots with a single tap.
- It doesn’t cause hallucinations and is more accurate than similar Android features.
- You can use this feature on every iPhone compatible with iOS 26.
I struggle to find really useful artificial intelligence features in daily life. Sure, it’s nice to remove unwanted objects from my photos, but most of the other AI capabilities on recent phones are one-time party tricks.
Unlike one of those features, I found an easier use case with Galaxy AI on the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra last year. A similar capability is now coming to your iPhone with iOS 26. The feature I’m talking about is the one-tap Add to Calendar feature.
Also: I’ve tested every iPhone 17 model, and this time I’m recommending something different
Within my first day with the iPhone 17 Pro Max, I found this feature to be more useful and better than expected. I’ve been testing this feature on my iPhone 15 Pro in developer beta, and it’s become more intuitive in the stable iOS 26 build.
As a freelancer who needs to coordinate with multiple people across apps and time zones for deadlines and meetings, adding things to my calendar helps me block my time and be more organized. You usually need to manually add things to your Calendar app, which can be time-consuming. After all, if you’re doing this multiple times a day it adds up. I struggle with this manual approach, which is why it feels refreshing to have this ability just a tap away.
Apple’s Add to Calendar feature is part of visual intelligence. All you have to do is take a screenshot of an event invitation, and the AI will suggest an “Add to Calendar” prompt. Tap it, and it creates an event, which you can edit or add to your calendar. For example, I received an invitation to a Diwali party with details of date, time and venue. I took a screenshot, tapped the Add to Calendar option, and the feature added the exact details of the event to my Calendar app. No editing required.
Although it blocked an hour of my time since the invitation said “from 7 pm onwards”, I don’t mind this small error for such a casual outing. I couldn’t include screenshots of more sensitive content like restrictions and meeting details in this article, but this feature corrects those time slots as well. Again, without any editing required.
Also: This convenient Apple Intelligence feature saves me over $200 per year
This feature is more impressive than expected, as similar capabilities on the best Android phones tend to get some details wrong.
How to use the Add to Calendar feature in Visual Intelligence on your iPhone
To add an event using Visual Intelligence on your Apple device, you must have an iPhone that runs iOS 26. Once your device is updated, here’s how you can use the feature:
- Open the invitation or event you want to add in your Calendar app.
- Take a screenshot of your screen, showing all the details like time, date and location.
- Apple Intelligence will now suggest the Add to Calendar option. Tap on this.
- You should get a pop-up with event details in the calendar with two options: Edit or Create event.
- Tap on Create Event and it will be added to your Calendar app.
The best part of the feature is that these screenshots don’t clutter your photos because your iPhone won’t save them if you tap Close (x button) in the top-left corner. If you want to save the screenshot, you can tap the tick (top-right corner) and find it in your Photos app later.
Also: The surprising ways AI helps strong dev teams and hurts weaker ones, according to Google
I find Galaxy AI’s sidebar implementation of AI Select more intuitive because I don’t have to press buttons on the phone. However, unlike its competitors, Apple’s Add to Calendar feature does not hallucinate and constantly corrects the day, time, and location. This reliability is what makes the iPhone feature different from its competitors and motivates me to use it again and again.
The Cupertino company’s Add to Calendar is the first AI productivity feature on any phone that I can trust in terms of reliability. This is something I don’t need to double-check. Of course, I still do, because this feature uses AI (and I’ve missed two meetings in the past while testing similar tools), but I hope this success will make me trust AI more over time.
