# A Practical Guide to Connecting Your Calendar to Your AI Receptionist

> Google Calendar, Outlook, or the built-in scheduler — here's how to pick the right one and get bookings flowing in under ten minutes.

Source: https://convocart.ai/blog/connect-calendar-guide

## Pick the calendar that matches how you already work

If your team already lives in Google Calendar or Outlook, connect that one — the agent reads and writes to it directly, so a booking made over the phone shows up exactly where your team already looks for their schedule. If you don't have either, the inbuilt scheduler works the same way with no external account needed.

## Connecting Google Calendar or Outlook

Both connect via OAuth from the dashboard's calendar settings — authorize once, and the agent has live read/write access from then on, refreshed automatically in the background so the connection doesn't expire mid-week.

## What the agent actually does with it

When a caller asks to book, the agent checks real availability against the connected calendar before offering a time — it never offers a slot that's already taken, and never books over an existing appointment. On the website widget this shows up as a slot picker card; on phone calls, the agent reads the available times out loud instead.

## Switching calendars later

Changing which calendar is connected doesn't affect appointments already booked — it only changes where new bookings go from that point forward.