Alto uses your emails to clean up your calendar

Smartphones are an absolute godsend for organizing... well, pretty much everything. Yet despite all they do for us, it can still be hugely frustrating when your various calendar apps don't play nicely with each other. AOL (Engadget's parent company, for full disclosure) is trying to solve this headache with the latest update for its Mail tool, Alto.

For the uninitiated, Alto is an iOS and Android app that combines all your calendar appointments and email accounts into one tap-able hub. While it's it looks like AOL is addressing a few of them in its latest update. Although it has always combined your various email inboxes, annoyingly, Alto would only previously track your appointments if they were made via Google Calendar.

Now, the app will link together all of your different email calendars whether they're from Exchange email accounts, Yahoo, iCloud or most other providers. This will allow users to schedule, track and edit all their appointments in one easy to manage place. In another nice touch, this update makes Calendar events appear as actionable cards in the app's dashboard, helping appointments to stay just as visible as important emails.

For those who prefer talking to their phone rather than swiping at it, the update also looks to make its existing Alexa support more useful. Previously, Amazon's personal assistant only really integrated with Google Calendar, merely allowing users to ask about events that you'd penciled in already. Now, she will have access to all of your email accounts too, meaning that by asking her a simple question she can dig through your inbox for you, finding the date of that meeting that you've been dreading.

If like me, you sorely need a bit of organization in your life you can download the Alto update now from both the App Store and the Google Play Store.

Disclaimer: Alto is made AOL, Engadget's parent company.