Describe Your Event in a Sentence and Let Gia Set It Up

Most events fit in a single sentence. “Gentle yoga for seniors, Friday from five to seven, at the community center, ten dollars, room for twenty.”

That sentence has everything the event needs. A name, a day, a time, a place, a price and a cap.

Putting that same event on your website is a different kind of job. You open the editor and type the title. You pick the date and set the start and end times. You choose a calendar, write a description, add the location, then go to the Tickets tab to set the price and the number of seats. None of it is hard. It’s just the same sentence again, taken apart one field at a time.

Say hello to Gia AI

Gia is the friendly character in the corner of your Sugar Calendar screens. It used to open a menu of quick links. Now it opens a chat, and you can tell it about your event the way you’d tell a colleague.

Gia reads what you wrote, asks a couple of quick questions about anything that’s missing, shows you the whole event, and saves it as a draft for you to check. You can also ask it to change events you already have, and, if you sell tickets or take RSVPs, how your registrations are going.

Describe the event the way you’d say it out loud

Click New Event with Gia AI on your Events page, or open Gia from the corner of any Sugar Calendar screen. You’ll see a few event types you can tap first, like Online, Free Event or All Day (Recurring appears on the plans that include it), and a textbox to describe the rest in your own words.

Gia picks the date, time and place out of your sentence and only asks about what you left out. The questions come as short answers you tap, so you’re picking options rather than writing an essay. In the example below I didn’t give a price, how many people could come, or a title, and the Classes calendar didn’t exist yet. Those are the four things Gia asked about, and it offered to create the new calendar for me.

If your sentence already covers everything, Gia can skip the questions altogether. When I asked for a free chair yoga class every Tuesday from 10 to 11 until mid-December, with no sign-up needed, it went straight to the summary, repeat schedule included.

Nothing goes live until you say so

Before Gia saves anything, it lays the event out in a summary: title, description, date, time, calendar, location and how people sign up. If something’s off, click I want some edits and say what to change. If it looks right, click Use this Event.

Gia then saves the event as a draft and opens it in the editor for you, with the title, date, time, description, calendar and ticket already filled in. You look it over, change anything you like, and press Publish yourself. Gia doesn’t publish events, and it won’t delete them either. Ask it to and it’ll point you to your Events list instead.

Change an event by asking for the change

Plans move. The room gets cheaper, or you realize people should bring something with them.

Choose Edit existing event, name the event, and say what you want to change. Gia shows a Before and After table so you can see the change next to the old value, and nothing is saved until you approve it with Apply. In my example I asked it to drop the ticket price from $10 to $8 and add a line asking people to bring their own mat and a bottle of water.

Get your numbers without building a report

Choose Ask about events and ask a question the way you’d ask a person. With the Event Ticketing or RSVP addon on your site, that can be how many people registered this month, or how many tickets you sold in the last 30 days and what they brought in.

Gia answers in a couple of sentences, puts the numbers in bold, and tells you which dates it counted, so you know which period the figure covers. When it can compare against the period before, it does that too.

What this looks like in a real week

Picture a volunteer who looks after the events page for a neighborhood library. Most weeks there’s a free talk, a club meeting or a taster session to add, usually squeezed in between other jobs.

On Monday she opens Gia and types: free talk on the history of the neighborhood, next Thursday from six to seven in the community room, people should RSVP, room for 30. The only thing Gia needs is a name, so she taps one of its suggestions, and the summary comes back with the date, the time and “Free RSVP, up to 30 people”. She clicks Use this Event, adds a photo in the editor, and publishes.

On Wednesday she remembers that there will be coffee and cookies after the talk. She asks Gia to add that to the description, checks the Before and After table, and clicks Apply. On Thursday afternoon she asks how many people have RSVP’d, so she knows how many chairs to put out.

Who will feel this most

• Studios and community centers running weekly classes, like yoga, pottery, language or fitness, who add new sessions all the time and would rather type them than click through them.
• Volunteer-run groups, like a library events team or a church that hosts a weekly coffee morning, where whoever is on duty this week may not know the editor well.
• Workshop and course organizers selling tickets, who change prices as dates fill up and want a quick read on registrations.
• Agencies building event sites for clients, who want to hand over a site the client’s staff can add events to by describing them.

Your first event with Gia

1. Open Gia where you already add events. On the Events page, click New Event with Gia AI. You can also click Gia in the bottom corner of any Sugar Calendar screen and choose Create a new event.

2. Describe the event in one go. Tap any event types that fit, then write the details you know: what it is, when, where, and what it costs.

3. Answer the quick questions. Tap an option for each one, or choose Other to type your own answer, then click Submit Answer, as in the yoga example above.

4. Check the summary and save the draft. Read the summary, ask for changes if you want any, then click Use this Event. The draft opens in the editor, like the one shown earlier, ready for you to review and publish.

The docs have a full guide to using Gia AI to create and manage events, including every option on each screen.

What you need to use it

Gia is on every plan, including the free Lite version. Update Sugar Calendar to the latest version, along with the Event Ticketing and RSVP addons if you use them, and you’ll find Gia on your Events page and in the corner of your Sugar Calendar screens.

What Gia can set up depends on the features your plan includes:

• Lite (free): create, edit and ask about your events, ticketed events included.
• Every paid plan: everything in Lite, plus repeating events, like a class every Tuesday until December.
• Plus, Pro and Elite: everything above, plus RSVP events and questions about ticket sales and RSVP counts. These plans include the Event Ticketing and RSVP addons that Gia works with, and Event Ticketing also lets you sell more than one ticket type for the same event.

Gia runs on AI credits, which are separate from the integration credits that features like Zoom or Google use. Every plan includes some. Lite comes with a one-time allowance so you can try Gia out, and paid plans get a monthly allowance that resets on the 1st. Allowances vary by plan, and the bigger plans include more. You can see how much you’ve used under Events » Settings » License & Usage.

Gia also needs WordPress 6.9 or newer and a site that’s live on the internet, because that’s how it connects to our AI service. On a site running on your own computer you’ll see the usual quick links in the corner instead.

If you’d like repeating events, RSVPs, or a bigger monthly allowance, the Events pricing page has the plans, and each one comes with a 14-day money-back guarantee.

Why this matters

Your calendar already knows a lot about your events. Gia changes how you get things in and out of it. You say what you want in plain words, and you’re still the one who checks the result and decides.

That matters most on the busy weeks, when adding events is one job among twenty. A sentence and a couple of taps is a lot easier to fit between other things than a form you have to sit down for.

If you build sites for clients, it’s worth knowing that Gia works through the WordPress Abilities API, the same set of event actions that outside AI assistants can use. If your clients would rather work from their own AI tool, there’s a guide to using Sugar Calendar Events with AI assistants as well.

Try it on your next event

Next time you have a class or meetup to add, try Gia instead of filling in the form. Describe it in your own words and answer its questions. When the draft opens, see how much of it is already filled in.

Thank you to everyone who shares how they run their events with us, through support, reviews and the feedback form. If there’s something you’d like Gia to help with next, tell us.

Gregor Capuder
Product Manager

---

Frequently asked questions