Robin can now read text from photos of school flyers
What we added
Robin can now parse text from photos. You can upload a picture of a school flyer, sports schedule, or neighborhood event poster, and Robin will extract the dates, times, and event names to add to your family calendar.
The flow is the same as sending Robin anything else. Tap the paperclip beside the microphone in the chat, choose the flyer from your camera roll or take the picture there and then, and type something like "add these to our calendar" or just "what's on here?" Robin reads the text and works out what matters.
One thing it deliberately does not do is save a pile of events without asking. When what it read off one picture adds up to more than three things to create, Robin stops and lists what it found first, each title with its date and time, and waits for a yes. Paper is where misreads happen, and checking a list of six is faster than unpicking six wrong events later.
It works best on single-page flyers with clear dates. Spirit week schedules, half-day announcements, the orthodontist appointment card they hand you at checkout. Multi-event posters work too, like a community center's spring programs or a school fundraiser calendar.
What works and what doesn't yet
Robin does well with standard date formats: "March 15" or "3/15" or "Friday, March 15th." It can handle time ranges like "6-8 PM". Relative phrases like "next Tuesday" are the ones to double-check. Robin turns the phrase into a real date, but a flyer that spent a week in a backpack may mean a different Tuesday than the one you would pick today, so look at the date Robin gives back before you move on. Phrases like that are on the checklist I run before shipping any Robin update, and a flyer is where they are easiest to get wrong.
It struggles with ambiguous layouts. Dense calendars with tiny text in grid cells, or flyers where the dates are buried in paragraph form. A wrinkled page or a heavy shadow across the paper can cost it words. And a flyer listing several weeks without making the month obvious is exactly the sort of thing the confirmation step is there to catch.
If Robin misses a detail, you can type a follow-up like "the bake sale is actually on the 22nd, not the 12th" and it will correct the event.
Why this matters
The point of what Robin actually reads, and what it never will is to handle the ephemeral stuff that clutters your counter, not to become another inbox that demands attention.
School flyers are exactly that kind of ephemeral clutter. They arrive crumpled in a backpack on Friday afternoon, announce something important for next Wednesday, and then disappear into the recycling bin. Being able to photograph them and move on means one less piece of paper sitting on your kitchen counter, waiting for someone to manually copy the dates into a calendar.
This also pairs naturally with Robin's voice input. If you're standing at the tablet and your kid hands you a flyer, you can snap the photo, say "add these," and you're done. No typing, no switching apps, no risk that the paper will vanish before anyone writes it down.
The limits, stated plainly
A photo is read by looking at it. A PDF is read as text, which is a different thing: a scanned page, or a photo saved as a PDF, has no text in it, so that comes back empty. Photograph the page and send it as an image instead and Robin can see it.
The email forwarding address does not read pictures at all. A schedule that arrived as a screenshot in an email has to come to Robin's chat rather than be forwarded.
And the picture itself is not kept. It goes to the model that reads it and is discarded. What stays in the chat is a small thumbnail, so you can tell which flyer a reply was about.
Try it with the next one that comes home crumpled in a backpack.