Robin can now read text from photos of school flyers
The NestBoard team · 2026-06-11
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 uploading a photo to ask Robin anything else. Tap the image button, choose the flyer from your camera roll, and type something like "add these to our calendar" or just "what's on here?" Robin reads the text, figures out what matters, and creates the events.
This works particularly well for single-page flyers with clear dates—think spirit week schedules, half-day announcements, or the orthodontist appointment card they hand you at checkout. It also handles multi-event posters, like the 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" and knows that "Next Tuesday" means the upcoming Tuesday relative to today.
It struggles with ambiguous layouts—dense calendars with tiny text in grid cells, or flyers where the dates are buried in paragraph form. If the paper is wrinkled or the lighting casts heavy shadows, the OCR can miss words. And if the flyer lists events for multiple weeks without making it obvious which month, Robin sometimes guesses wrong.
We're working on those edge cases. For now, if you upload something and 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
We've talked before about what Robin actually reads (and what it never will)—the goal is to handle the ephemeral stuff that clutters your counter, not to become an inbox that demands constant 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.
What's next
We're refining the OCR to handle more complex layouts—multi-column newsletters, calendars with color-coded categories, flyers with decorative fonts. We're also teaching Robin to recognize recurring patterns, so if you upload a sports schedule with ten games, it can create a repeating event instead of ten individual ones.
For now, try it with the next flyer that comes home. If it works, you'll save a few minutes. If it doesn't quite get it right, let us know—we're learning what families actually photograph.