August 2026 update: Telegram, your family group chat, calendar you can read, and more

August was a big month. Baylo moved into Telegram, learned to sit in your family group chat, and had a proper visual going-over.

Baylo is now on Telegram, family group chat and all

Baylo carries your family's admin: the reminders, the calendar, the notes and the lists. Until now that meant WhatsApp, the app on your phone, or your browser. Now it means Telegram too. Connect it once in Settings, Connections, and everything comes with you. Same account, same reminders, voice notes, photos, PDFs, you name it.

The bigger news is what happens next. You can add Baylo to the family Telegram chat you already use, set up from that group's page in the app. Baylo reads the room but stays quiet, and only answers when someone tags @BayloBot, opens with "Hey Baylo", replies to it, or taps one of its buttons.

Because it has been following along, you never have to explain anything twice. Swimming moves to Tuesday at five, someone tags Baylo, and it is a shared reminder for the whole family. Somebody drops a photo of the club letter into the chat and a term's worth of dates come back out. "Hey Baylo, what did we decide about Saturday?" gets you the answer instead of five minutes of scrolling.

Anything saved in that chat is shared with the family group, and anything private stays private and never shows up there. For Baylo to save what someone says, they need to be in the Baylo group with their own Telegram connected. Everyone else carries on chatting as normal.

WhatsApp does not let assistants into group chats, so this one is Telegram-only. On WhatsApp, shared reminders keep arriving as private messages to each person, exactly as they do now.

A calendar you can actually read

The month view used to show dots. A dot tells you something is happening on Thursday, which you had probably worked out. Now it shows the actual titles, with a count on the busy days, and tapping a day opens the full list underneath (or on the side, if you are on a computer). There is a new week view too.

And you pick what opens first. In Settings > Account, set your default view to the reminders list, the weekly calendar or the monthly calendar. Past reminders live in the calendar as well, with a quick search, so the thing you did in June is findable without asking.

Colours, and who is doing what

Reminders can now carry a colour. Eleven muted ones, and nothing is coloured until you say so. Colour a single reminder, a whole selection at once, everything in a group, or everything arriving from a connected calendar. You can also just ask: "make the dentist yellow". Events from Google turn up wearing the colour you already gave them there.

Then name your colours. Hold a swatch and call it School, Football, Dad, Nan. The names are yours, and nobody else in the family sees them.

Here is the part that earns its keep. Link a colour's name to someone in your family group and the colour becomes the assignment. Paint a shared reminder that colour and that person is looking after it. Change the colour and it moves. One glance at the week tells you who is doing the pickups, and changing your mind is a tap rather than a conversation. If you had already told Baylo who was looking after what, that is colour now, done for you.

Apple Calendar now flows in

Google and Outlook have synced both ways since July. Apple was the gap. Paste your Apple or iCloud calendar's public link into Settings, Connections, and its events arrive in Baylo and stay in step, up to ten years ahead.

It is one-way link - unlike Google and Outlook which sync both ways. Write an e-mail to Apple to ask why they don't make two-way sync available, I guess. Anyway, Baylo reads that Apple calendar and any other calendar that uses same iCal format.

Behind the scenes, in the open

There is a new page at baylo.ai/behind-the-scenes showing what we are fixing right now, what is coming next, and what has just landed. No sign-in needed. Also available from Settings menu.

We built it because the honest answer to "is anyone actually working on this?" should be a page you can look at, not a support reply.

And plenty more

You can now set your own default heads-up in Settings > Alerts: one lead time for anything with a clock time, and a separate rule for all-day things like birthdays. Your daily and weekly summaries can carry overdue items along with them. Baylo's all-day reminders go into your work calendar as Free rather than Busy, so an inset day no longer blocks out your Thursday. Sign in with Apple now works everywhere, not just on iPhone. Phone notifications are steadier, and Baylo's WhatsApp messages have had a proper tidy-up. Behind all that sits a long list of bugs found and fixed, which you can read through on the Behind The Scenes page.

Keep telling us

Almost everything above started as a message from one of our users. The family group chat exists because you kept telling us the plans happen in the group chat and Baylo was not in it.

The feedback button is in the app: bottom right corner on desktop, in the settings menu on mobile. It comes straight to us, and we read all of it.

Baylo is free, on WhatsApp, on Telegram, on your phone and in your browser.