Inspiration
I almost missed Technica because I forgot to put the event in my Google Calendar. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the first time and I've had countless moments where I planned to attend something, only to forget because adding events manually is slow and often inaccurate. When an event has a location, a Zoom link, a date, a time, and a paragraph-long description, I end up switching tabs, copying each field one by one, and often getting distracted or forgetting entirely.
During the opening ceremony at Technica, our speaker talked about solving a “boring problem that keeps haunting you.” This immediately resonated. For me, that boring problem was my constant struggle to capture events quickly and reliably. So I built Evently: a tool that lets me paste any event description, from flyers, emails, announcements, or even something someone tells me, and automatically turns it into a clean, ready-to-add Google Calendar event.
What it does
Evently is a Chrome extension that turns unstructured text into a fully populated Google Calendar event automatically. You paste any event description into the extension. The extension uses the Google Gemini API to parse the title, date, start/end times, location, and meeting links. The event is then added directly to your Google Calendar using the Google Calendar API.
How we built it
Chrome Extension: The front-end popup handles user input and displays parsed event details. We used HTML/CSS/JS, Chrome extension manifest v3, and messaging between the popup, background service worker, and backend.
Node.js Backend: Our server receives raw text from the extension, forwards it to Gemini with a custom parsing prompt, and cleans the structured output.
Gemini API: We engineered a prompt to extract event metadata reliably, title, date, start time, end time, location, and description, in a JSON format compatible with Google Calendar.
Challenges we ran into
- Learning Chrome extension architecture
- Hooking Google Gemini and learning how to parse information with Gemini
- Making Gemini output parseable JSON reliably
- Debugging
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Fully integrated Gemini → Chrome Extension → Google Calendar API workflow
What we learned
How Chrome extensions really work
What's next for Evently
Automatic Zoom/Google Meet link detection Mobile version
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