How to let AI plan your day on your iPhone with Outside

Organize your social life and never run out of things to do with the help of this clever iOS app.

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Make sure you specify the year when asking Outside’s AI assistant to add a plan to your calendar, otherwise you might find it marks the event as having happened in the past.

These days, making social plans can be both tricky and tedious. With so many choices available to you, landing on one thing can at times feel overwhelming. Yet repeatedly adding events to your calendar and working out the best time to do them can often feel like a chore.

Outsideis an app that tries to solve both of these problems. It offers up suggestions for things to do, whether that’s places to vacation or days out with friends closer to home. Once you’ve decided on a plan of action, it can add the plans to a calendar and remind you nearer the time, ensuring you never miss an opportunity.

It also bundles in an AI assistant that can talk through your ideas and suggest enjoyable events, and comes with a bunch of handy extras, including widgets, Live Activities and sharing tools. With all that, it aims to be the first place you go when filling up your spare time.

Once you’ve started to let AI plan your day, you might not want to go back to the old way. Use Outside well and you’ll get more time to spend, well, outside.

Tools & requirements

Quick steps

Step by step guide

1. Make your first plan

Tap theCreatebutton at the bottom of the app. Enter a name for your plan or select one of the options beneath the name field. Now pick a date for the event on the calendar and tapNext.

On the next page, you can enter more details, including the location, time, event image, and whether the plan lasts all day.

TapCalendarand allow access in the subsequent permissions box. Calendar syncing requires a subscription but allows you to keep everything up to date. Anything added to your calendar app will be sent to Outside, and vice versa. Select the calendar you want to sync.

TapRemindersto set when and how often Outside will give you a nudge about your plans. TapRepeatsto determine whether the plan recurs on a regular basis, and tapNotesto jot down some ideas and thoughts, if you like.

When you’ve got everything set, tapCreate. On the next screen, tapContinueto save the plan to your calendar, then pick a calendar to sync it with.

You can view all your plans by tapping theCreatebutton.

2. Get AI suggestions

One of the key components of Outside is its AI assistant. This is designed to give you ideas that you can add to your calendar, ensuring you’ve always got plenty to do.

Tap theAssistantbutton at the bottom of the Outside app. You can enter your thoughts in theI’d like ideas for…box or tap one of the suggestions below.

Once you’ve done that, you’ll enter a conversation-like screen where you can message the app’s AI and get ideas. It will respond with suggestions for your next event.

Note that at the time of writing, Outside can’t make booking reservations for you. However, the app’s developer says this is in the works.

What Outside’s AIcando is add events to the app’s calendar. Just tell the AI what you want to do, where it will happen and on which date, and it will add the plan for you.

3. Get more from Outside

Tap theOutsidebutton at the bottom of the app. Here, you can see all your upcoming plans, along with a globe showing where they will take place. Tap the weather icon in the top-right corner to see daily and hourly forecasts for your event locations so you can plan ahead.

Tap and hold one of your plans to bring up some more options. TapStart Live Activityto add the plan to your iPhone’s Lock Screen, with a countdown and key info at your fingertips. You can also change the event’s image, share it, or delete it by tapping and holding on it.

Outside also has a ton of widgets that you can add to your iOS Home Screen. These include interactive countdowns for upcoming events, a list of your plans, and more.

Final thoughts

Outside makes it simple to not only come up with activity ideas, but to add them to your device and invite friends to tag along. It’s a good way to ensure you’ve got plenty to do, even if you’re short on ideas.

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Alex Blake has been fooling around with computers since the early 1990s, and since that time he’s learned a thing or two about tech. No more than two things, though. That’s all his brain can hold. As well as TechRadar, Alex writes for iMore, Digital Trends and Creative Bloq, among others. He was previously commissioning editor at MacFormat magazine. That means he mostly covers the world of Apple and its latest products, but also Windows, computer peripherals, mobile apps, and much more beyond. When not writing, you can find him hiking the English countryside and gaming on his PC.

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