The AI Was Really Helpful in Organizing My Flight Information
I’ve struggled to find uses for AI. It’s not that I’m not motivated – my job is to try out new technologies and point out useful ways to use them – but I rarely, if ever, come across something that AI can do that I can’t do faster and/or better with some other tool.
Until now.
I recently took a long trip that included multiple flights and wanted to add those flights to my calendar. I was annoyed to find that the airline didn’t have a button for this or even download iCal – all I got was a list of flight times. So I thought I’d try AI.
I copied the time into Claude , an AI tool similar to ChatGPT. I asked the bot to convert the dates to the iCal file and it worked. All I had to do was download the suggested text file, change the file name extension to “ics” and add it to my calendar. This worked great: the times were even converted to account for time zone differences in all locations.
It seems that not every AI is suitable for this. I tested with ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Claude. Gemini gave me a tutorial on how to create an iCal file, which I didn’t want; ChatGPT provided me with a partial download of iCal that was missing most of the events. I probably could have gotten better results by changing the prompt, but with Claude I didn’t have to do that: I got a perfectly formatted iCal file with a download button. All I had to do was rename the file extension after downloading and I could open it in the Calendar app on my Mac.
I think this might be my ideal application of AI: taking unstructured text data and converting it into an actual file. iCal works in any context when someone gives you a list of dates and times – just copy it and ask your favorite bot to create an iCal file.
This doesn’t just apply to calendar appointments: you can create almost any file, as long as you have the right data. For example: I copied some numbers from Wikipedia and asked Claude to turn them into a CSV file – it worked.
Basically, if there is data that you want to organize in a certain file type, Claude seems like a good solution. There’s a catch. The free version of Claude will complain if you insert a large data set and possibly stop the conversion halfway through. However, if you are a paying customer, it should go through.
Again, I’m not exactly an AI expert, but I find this useful. Give Claude a try the next time you need to turn your random typing into an actual file—it might work.