Robin can see your whiteboard now
The NestBoard team · 2026-07-19
We added image recognition to Robin this week. You can now take a photo of a whiteboard, a sticky note, or a handwritten list, and Robin will read it and add it to your calendar or tasks.
This came out of watching families use the kitchen tablet. A lot of households keep a dry-erase board on the fridge for the weekly schedule — soccer practice, dentist appointments, pizza night. Someone updates it every Sunday. Then someone else opens NestBoard and types the same information all over again.
Now you just photograph the board and send it to Robin. It reads the dates, times, and labels, then creates the events. You review them, fix anything that looks off, and tap to confirm.
What it's good at
Robin handles printed text and reasonably legible handwriting. It understands common date formats — "Tues 3pm," "April 12," "next Monday." It can pull out names, times, and short descriptions.
It works well for weekly schedules, shopping lists, meal plans written on paper, or notes from a family meeting. If you've been keeping a running list on a notepad and don't want to transcribe it, this helps.
What it's not
This isn't OCR for documents or receipts. Robin won't parse a multi-page form or extract data from a table. It's built for the kind of quick, informal notes families actually write — the stuff you'd normally retype by hand anyway.
And it doesn't store your photos. Once Robin reads the image and extracts the text, the photo is discarded. We covered this in more detail when we wrote about what Robin actually reads.
How we're using it
Internally, we've been using it for meeting agendas written on the office whiteboard. Someone snaps a photo at the end, and Robin creates the action items as tasks with due dates.
One tester uses it for her kids' weekly activity schedule, which the school prints on paper and sends home every Friday. She photographs it, Robin adds the events, and she's done in thirty seconds instead of five minutes of manual entry.
Another family has a shared grocery list on the counter. When it gets long, they photograph it and let Robin turn it into pantry items or a shopping checklist.
Why now
We've had voice input for Robin since launch, and you could always type or forward an email. But a lot of household information lives on paper or whiteboards, and retyping it felt like the wrong kind of friction.
This feature doesn't change what NestBoard is. It just removes one small, annoying step between the way your family already organizes and the way the app works.
You'll find the camera icon in Robin's input bar. Take a photo, and it'll tell you what it sees.