How to Connect iCloud Calendar to Alexa

Introduction

Alexa is my favorite voice assistant. It’s advanced and versatile and probably as close to a real human assistant as possible. Much of Alexa’s power comes from its ability to tap into vast amount of data via built-in capabilities and so-called Alexa Skills.

An assistant, whether a human or AI is of less use if she does not have access to your calendar. By default, Alexa uses Amazon’s built-in calendar. While that’s not bad, I don’t think many people use Amazon’s default calendar.

For Android users, Google Calendar would be a primary choice while for iOS users, iCloud calendar is the most obvious option. Many people use Microsoft Outlook calendar as well.

Fortunately, Alexa can connect to all major calendar providers — Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook Calendar and Apple iCloud Calendar. In this story I will describe how to connect your iCloud calendar to Alexa.

Prerequisites

To connect iCloud calendar to Alexa you need two things. The first is the latest version of Alexa app. The second is enabling a 2FA (two factor authentication) in your iCloud account. You have probably already enabled 2FA in your iCloud account. If not, we’ll do that in a moment.

Let’s start

Open the Alexa app and go to Settings. Scroll down and find the Calendars item. Tap the Add Account with a + icon. Follow the instructions. For your convenience, all steps are displayed in the follwoing screenshot. For the final screen, you need to create an app-specific password. More on that in a moment.

App Specific Passwords

You have to create an app-specific password in iCloud. It’s easy. Open https://appleid.apple.com/account/manage in your browser. Scroll down to the Security section and use Generate password… as shown on the screenshot below. You can use any label, for example Amazon Alexa. Once the password is generated, you can use it in the Alexa app.

Check the iCloud calendars you want to connect with Alexa. Now your iCloud Calendar is connected with Alexa.

Fine-tuning the calendar

Alexa gives you more fine grained control over your calendar.

Default calendars

If you have setup your voice with Alexa, you can choose which calendar used by default for your voice and which calendar is used for other people in your household.

Notifications

You can enable or disable notifications for each connected calendar. If you have multiple Alexa-enabled devices, you can set which device is used to announce calendar notifications.

Finally, you can set Do Not Disturb period, which by default is from 10:00pm to 7:00am.

Conclusion

Trust me, enabling calendar in Alexa is one of the best things you could do. You will be checking calendar in your phone or computer far less often and of course you won’t miss your next event.

Oh and yes. You can always ask “Alexa, what did I miss”?

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