The Hearth Display Has Finally Moved Its “assistant” to Where It Belongs
Hearth Helper offered Hearth Display users the ability to text or email customer support to download a list of events on their behalf, such as bulk downloading school calendar events. But as of March 19, this feature has also been integrated into the Hearth mobile app.
Hearth Display, a modern family management tool that functions as a shared digital calendar and to-do list, used to include a feature called “Hearth Helper” directly into the 27-inch tablet. When I reviewed Hearth Display to see if the device was worth the hype (and the $699 price tag, often selling for $599), I found the feature odd. You might assume that “Assistant” would be a direct line to customer support, but clicking on the “Assistant” option only offered a popup with a phone number and email address if they wanted the AI to bulk download a list of events. For example, you can send Assistant an image of your child’s school calendar, and the AI will import the data into your Hearth calendar. I haven’t thought much about the feature since – personally, the last thing I’d want is for an AI to bulk download something like a school calendar and clutter up my calendar – but when Hearth brought the feature to the mobile app, I became curious again.
Where to find Hearth Helper in the mobile app
To use Hearth Helper on the mobile app, start by updating the Hearth app on your device. You may not even be able to use the Hearth app without this latest update: When I opened the app, a notification appeared in full screen mode asking me to update it to the latest version. This was the first time I was forced to update an app; In the past, I manually updated the app, fixing bugs and adding new features, like the ability to update programs directly from my phone or add my own to-do lists .
After updating the app, Hearth Helper can be found as a chat window icon in the top right corner of the screen, next to the notification ringer. It’s an intuitive place for the Helper feature, and it’s laid out much better than before: Before this latest update, Hearth Helper had a prominent tab on the Hearth display, next to the Calendar, Lists, and Programs menus. After the update, a pop-up ad appeared on my Hearth Display tablet that said “Hearth Helper has moved!” with the explanation that their AI calendar companion now lives in the app.
How to use Hearth Helper
Testing out the new mobile Hearth Helper was easy enough: the AI prompt gives examples of the types of wording you can use to create calendar events, or you can simply tap the camera icon to take a photo of the schedule, or load one you’ve already saved on your phone. What I was most interested in was how long it would take to process the request. Here’s what Hearth Helper looks like when you click on the icon in the mobile app:
When I asked Hearth Helper to create a basic encounter, it took the AI less than a minute to send me a “Pending Event” for approval. It has the option to “Accept All” or “Reject All” for users who have submitted multiple events, or simply like up or down for each pending event.
To make things more challenging, I downloaded a PDF of the New York City Department of Education calendar for the 2024-2025 school year to see how long it would take to download the full calendar. Then I realized that Hearth Helper cannot download PDF files. Instead, I took a photo of my screen—not a screenshot, but a lazy, grainy photo of my laptop screen taken from my phone camera—that included eight events over two months. Surprisingly, the events still took less than a minute to process, and the AI sent me a list of pending events that was formatted much better than I expected. However, of course, if I really wanted a full calendar of events, I would have to send multiple photos covering the entire year.
However, Hearth Helper has several notable limitations, including:
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You cannot upload lists (such as to-do or grocery lists) or routines using Hearth Helper.
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You’ll need to stick to basic images: Hearth Helper cannot download files from URLs, Word documents, Google sheets, or other similar formats.
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Hearth Helper is completely AI controlled. If you need help with something from a real person, you should contact [email protected] .
Is Hearth Helper worth using?
To be honest, I never expected to be able to use Hearth Helper for its intended purpose. One of the problems that I mentioned in my original review is that the idea behind Hearth Helper is, in my opinion, pretty shaky. Call me old-fashioned, but I want my customer service questions answered by an “assistant”, preferably a human, instead of mass downloading events that I could do myself in my preferred formats. I tend to be picky about calendar organization and event formats, and I’m guessing most people who use an expensive family management device to manage their home are too. But looking at the Hearth Helper bulk download results, I may have changed my mind for two reasons.
First, the events are precise and consistently formatted; and secondly, the list of imported events is clickable and easy to edit manually or dismiss entirely. My main concern was loading a huge list of poorly formatted clutter into my calendar, but that seems like less of a problem than I thought: I can just bulk load calendars that serve as additional event suggestions that I can edit, thumbs up to approve, or thumbs down to reject. Overall, it looks like this latest Hearth Display update will mean faster event management and fewer manual steps, and Hearth Helper will be useful before school, while planning for the new year, or whenever my kids join a new extracurricular activity or club.