Astro email app now includes a built-in calendar

Astro is the latest email app to add a built-in calendar so that you can flip directly between your inbox and a list of your upcoming events. But for Astro, the addition could eventually be even more helpful than it is elsewhere: the app’s big hook is the inclusion of an AI assistant that scans your emails and makes recommendations for you to take action on. That’ll be applied to the calendar too, which could, in theory, make dealing with new meetings a breeze — though it’s still a ways from getting there.

The new calendar, which will be available inside Astro’s iOS, Android, and macOS app after an update today, can be accessed with a tap at the bottom of the app’s screen, making it really easy to switch to and from the inbox. By default it uses an agenda view — which is clean and easy to read, as long as you don’t have too many events — and there’s also an optional single- and three-day view, in case you prefer a more traditional online calendar look. A big floating “plus” button lets you add a new event, but unfortunately there’s no natural language support, so you’ll have to fill out every field individually.

For the time being, the calendar seems like a handy addition but one with a lot of room for growth. It only works with Gmail and Office 365 right now (like the email portion of the app), and more importantly, Astrobot — the app’s smart assistant — can’t scan your emails to recommend adding new events. Someone emailed me yesterday with a clearly written date for a meeting, but the app didn’t suggest adding it to my calendar, leaving me to do it myself. In fairness, none of my other email apps suggested adding a calendar entry either, but that’s the kind of helpful feature that would help convince people to switch to Astro.

Astro CEO Andy Pflaum says that this is “something we plan to introduce in the future.” Support for iCloud is also at the top of the team’s list for new services.

There is limited integration between the calendar and Astrobot right now: though there isn’t natural language support inside the calendar itself, there is inside Astrobot. So if you pull up the smart assistant, you can add an event by typing out the details. Or at least, you’re supposed to be able to. I saw Pflaum successfully do this in a demo, but I’ve been trying out a beta of the latest release for a couple days, and haven’t been able to get it to work.

The addition of the calendar comes along with a light redesign of the app, which I think makes it a lot easier to navigate. It now has tabs at the bottom for your inbox, your calendar, and the app’s settings. More importantly, Astro’s AI features are now broken up into two parts: there’s an “insights” tab where it’ll deliver suggestions — one I have right now suggests that an email may be “time sensitive” because it includes an upcoming date — and then there’s another tab just for the bot, which you can type or talk to as a way to get things done. They used to be combined in a single chatbot interface, which was kind of confusing if you just wanted suggestions on what to do.

I like Astro’s ideas for helping people work through their inbox, but so far, I haven’t found its AI or interface any more helpful than something like Google’s Inbox. Even with these new improvements, I find the interface harder to read at a glance, and the suggestions aren’t much more helpful. Astro also tended to alert me to more emails that I didn’t care about; though in fairness, I had only been using it for a couple days, so it may still have needed time to learn.

Though Astro is available for free for everyone to download, it’s always been focused on eventually developing a business around enterprise users. That makes the calendar a particularly useful additional, even if it’s pretty basic at launch.

Pflaum says the next big Astro release will start to deliver optional, paid features for enterprise customers who want to widely adopt its app. That’ll include an integration with Salesforce and other “leading workplace services,” so that Astro’s AI can start to help companies figure out which customers’ and clients’ inquiries need to be addressed first.