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Reminders & scheduling

Half of what a busy week costs you is remembering to do things at the right moment, which is work you're doing constantly and never getting credit for. Hand it over: say it once, in the middle of whatever you were doing, and stop carrying it.

Pepper pings you at a time you choose — once, or on a repeating schedule — and can run a whole routine for you at that time, like your morning brief, without being asked again.

What you can schedule

Just say it in plain language — Pepper figures out the timing.

How times are read

Times are interpreted in your time zone (from your profile). "7am" means 7am where you are. You can phrase times naturally ("7am", "2:30pm", "every weekday"). If you're setting something up for a different time zone, just say so.

Exact time, or just a part of the day

For anything that repeats, Pepper usually doesn't make you commit to an exact minute — "every weekday morning" is what most people mean by "every weekday at 8am" anyway, so that's the default it reaches for.

One-time reminders aren't affected by any of this — a one-off keeps the exact moment you asked for. Neither is the morning brief or its other editions, or the daily feed briefing: those keep their own time settings in the Brief and Following apps.

Where reminders arrive

Every scheduled task keeps its own thread, and the result always lands there — that part isn't a choice. What you choose is where Pepper announces it on top of that: your main chat, email, text, a phone call, or any combination. "Email me the weekly summary and put it in my chat too" works exactly as it sounds. Pick them on the Scheduled tasks page or just ask.

Picking main chat means the result shows up in your everyday conversation like a normal reply from Pepper, so you can respond to it in context — and Pepper can recall it later, the same as anything else you two have discussed. Ask "what did my brief say about the budget?" weeks on and it can find it.

You can also pick nothing at all. A task with no destinations still runs on schedule and still files its result in its own thread — you just don't get pinged about it, by any channel or by a phone/browser notification. That's the right setup for something you want kept up to date but not interrupted by: a price check, a slow-moving watch item. Anything else — even a main-chat-only task — will buzz your devices if you have notifications turned on.

If you don't pick anything specific, a task follows your default notification setting, and changing that default later moves those tasks with it.

Telling a task to stay quiet unless there's something to say. Picking no destinations silences a task always. If instead you only want to hear from it when it actually finds something, say so in the task itself: "check my inbox every 30 minutes and only tell me if something new came in", "don't send a report if there's nothing to flag." A run that checks and comes up empty then delivers nothing at all — no email, no text, no chat message, no phone buzz — instead of sending you a note explaining that it had nothing to send. Runs that do find something reach you exactly as before.

Which checks this works for today. Pepper only goes quiet when it can be certain the check came up empty, and it can be certain about six: searching your mail, searching the web, searching your contacts and work directory, new items from the sites you follow, what's on your calendar in the window it looked at, and searching your past conversations and saved things. The common cases — "check my inbox every half hour and only tell me if something arrived", "only write to me when there's actually something new in my feeds" — are covered. A task that checks your to-dos or GitHub and finds nothing will still send its run, because Pepper can't yet tell "I looked and there was nothing" apart from an ordinary brief answer for those. Searching within your feeds for a term is in the same bucket, because a search that narrows by site or by date can come back empty without meaning "nothing new happened". More checks will learn it over time. If you've asked a task to stay quiet and it keeps writing to you anyway, this is usually why.

A check that Pepper couldn't finish doesn't count as certain either. If you have more than one mail account connected and one of them can't be reached that minute, the run tells you what it did find rather than going quiet — even when the accounts it did reach were empty. Silence would mean "there's nothing there", and Pepper doesn't know that about a mailbox it never opened.

The quiet runs aren't lost either: every run still files its result in the task's own thread, so its page shows the history and marks the ones where the task decided there was nothing worth telling you. (The thread on that page shows the newest 50 messages; on a long-running task the page says so above them rather than letting the thread just stop.) And Pepper leans toward sending: if the check turned anything up at all, you hear about it. So if you're ever unsure whether a quiet stretch meant "nothing happened", the task's own page is the place to confirm it — that's the record, and it's worth a look after you first set a task up this way.

An emailed result ends in a way back in. A scheduled task's email finishes with an Open this task in Pepper button pointing at that task's own page — its history of runs and the thread the result just landed in. That's the one thing the email can't do on its own: reply to the run. (The morning brief has its own button to its own morning; see below.) The exception is a task pointed at a room: a task's page is the owner's, so the mail every member receives carries the general Open in Pepper button instead — see "Scheduled tasks for a room" below.

What the notification itself says. By default the alert on your phone or browser shows the task's name and the first line of the result. A notification shows on a locked screen where anyone nearby can read it, so if you'd rather keep that private, turn off Notification previews under Settings → Notifications; the alert then just says "Your scheduled task has an update." and the name and result wait until you open Pepper. That setting isn't scoped to scheduled tasks — it's the one preview toggle for scheduled-task and room-message alerts alike — so turning it off affects group messages too. (Sending a recipe or workout to your Watch is separate: that handoff always names what you're sending, previews setting or not, since it's your own data rather than something Pepper wrote.) It's per-account and you can turn it back on whenever you like. On iPhone, tapping the notification opens that task's thread with the full result either way — scrolled to the run you were just notified about, not to the top of the history.

Pepper may offer to turn browser notifications on. If you come back to Pepper in a browser after a while away and something arrived while you were gone, you'll see a short banner at the top of the page asking whether you want notifications in that browser — with the alternative being to find the setting yourself, after the thing you missed has already been missed. Each browser is separate, so the one on your laptop knows nothing about the one on your desktop. "Not now" is remembered: the offer waits a week, and it stops asking after three times whatever you do. You can always turn it on yourself under Settings → Browser notifications, and if your browser is set to block notifications for Pepper, the banner won't appear at all — reset that in your browser's site settings first.

If you've replied STOP to text, that destination shows as unavailable on the page until you re-consent, and your other destinations keep working.

A STOP stops calls too. Replying STOP also stops Pepper calling you, so a task or brief set to arrive as a phone call won't ring until you re-consent. Calling Pepper yourself still works from a verified number. If you'd like texts but not calls, leave STOP alone and unpick Phone call wherever you've chosen it and check your Default delivery path under Settings → Notifications — a task you never gave destinations of its own follows that default, so clearing the per-task picks alone won't stop it. (Asking for a call in conversation still works: that's you choosing it there and then.)

Managing what you've scheduled

The morning brief

The most common scheduled routine is the morning brief — a short daily rundown of your calendar, anything notable from your inbox, optional weather, and a brief feeds: block (two to four of the more notable stories from the news you follow, each with a sentence or two of context). If you've connected GitHub, it also carries a one-line read on your review queue — how much is waiting and the item that's been waiting longest (see GitHub).

It picks up the rest of Pepper too, when there's something to say. Each of these appears only on the mornings it has material, so the brief stays short on a quiet day:

It's on by default, at 7am your time, from the moment you sign up — you don't have to switch it on, and you don't have to finish setting anything up first. It follows your account's time zone, so if you move, the brief moves with you and still arrives at 7am where you are. Once it's running, changing the time — whether you say so in conversation or save it from the Brief app — only moves the hour and doesn't change that. The one exception is turning it on for the first time from the Brief app rather than letting it opt you in automatically: that pins the brief to the zone you were in at that moment, the same way any other scheduled task's first save does, and from then on it stays in that zone rather than following you. Say "change my morning brief to 8am" to move it, or "turn off my morning brief" to stop it; either also works from the Brief app, where the time, the delivery channels and how far ahead the calendar reaches all live together. You can reply to ask follow-ups — either straight from wherever the brief arrived, or in the Brief app itself, which has a conversation of its own underneath the morning (see "Talking to your brief" below).

How it arrives. In the web chat a delivered brief is a card, not a paragraph — the picture of the day across the top, then the day's lede, your agenda, the tomorrow/weather/todos lines and the feed stories, all in one. Nothing is folded away; the brief is the message. Press it to open the Brief app, where the stories open and the todos tick. An emailed brief ends in a Read your brief in Pepper button that takes you to that same morning; if you're not signed in on that device, you'll sign in and land on the brief rather than the front door.

The image of the day. Each scheduled brief comes with a picture Pepper generates from what your day actually holds — a mood-piece, not a diagram. On email it's the banner across the top; in the web chat it heads the brief's card, and it's saved to your artifacts like anything else Pepper makes. It's drawn from themes and settings rather than specifics: no names, no addresses, no detail from an appointment or an email. A brief you ask for conversationally ("what's on my plate today?") skips the image and just answers. Tell Pepper what you'd rather see — "more watercolour, no photos" — and it remembers and steers every brief's picture that way from then on; there's no way to turn the picture off entirely.

Running it now. You don't have to wait for the morning. Say "run my morning brief" or "send me my brief", or press Run my brief now in the Brief app, and Pepper delivers a real one straight away — picture, delivery to wherever your brief normally goes, and its own entry in the Brief app alongside every other morning. It takes about a minute to put together, so the answer you get back is "on its way" and the brief itself follows; it doesn't arrive in the chat as you ask for it. It doesn't cancel or replace tomorrow's — your schedule carries on untouched. If you have more than one brief, name the one you want ("run my evening brief").

That's a different request from asking a question about your day. "What's on my plate today?" is answered on the spot, in the conversation — quicker, but it's just an answer: no picture, nothing delivered, and nothing added to the Brief app. Ask for the brief to be sent and you get the full thing; ask a question and you get a fast answer.

Now and then it mentions something you haven't tried. Every so often a brief carries a short line about a way of using Pepper you haven't used yet — that you can text it, email it something to read, hand someone a booking page. It's one at a time, and it only ever mentions something you genuinely haven't done: once you've tried it, that line stops on its own. Pepper works through the other suggestions before coming back to any one of them, and it'll bring the same thing up at most three times before leaving it alone for a month. It sits in the brief like any other part of it, with a link to the page here that explains the thing properly.

How far ahead it looks. By default the brief covers today and tomorrow, so an early meeting the next morning doesn't catch you out. You can change that any time by asking — "just show me today in my brief", "make my brief cover the next three days" — and Pepper remembers it for every future brief. You can go up to a week; ask for more and Pepper will tell you rather than quietly rounding you down. You can also set it from the Brief mini app, under "Calendar reach". Every day in that window gets its own line in the brief, so a three-day brief really does read three days deep. The weather line follows the same window — a three-day brief carries three days of forecast, named the same way the calendar lines are (today, tomorrow, then the weekday). Forecasts get less certain the further out they go, so a day Pepper can't ground is simply left off the weather line rather than guessed at; that day still shows its calendar.

Talking to your brief. The Brief app has a conversation of its own, sitting under the morning you're reading. Ask "why was this in my brief?" or "more on that first story" there and the answer lands in the app, next to the brief it's about — not in your everyday chat, where it would have nothing around it to make sense of. That thread remembers: a fortnight of mornings is already context, so you can ask about something from last Tuesday without digging it out first. Your everyday chat carries on separately, so a question you ask in the app stays with the briefs and doesn't clutter it.

Asking what a brief carried, from anywhere. You don't have to be in the Brief app, and you don't have to remember the wording. Ask about the source and the period — "what was my review queue like in July", "when did my feeds last fail to fetch", "has anything been sitting waiting that a brief never got round to showing me" — and Pepper looks it up in what each source actually reported, rather than searching for a phrase. That's a different question from "what did my brief say about the budget", which is a search of what you and Pepper have discussed; both work, and they find different things.

More than one brief a day. A morning brief isn't the only one you can have. In the Brief app, under Add another brief, you can add a midday, afternoon or evening edition — each with its own time and its own choice of where it reaches you, set the same way the morning one is. A second edition is a genuinely different read rather than the same thing twice: it covers what's happened since, so an evening brief is the rest of your day rather than a repeat of breakfast.

They all file into the same place. The archive in the Brief app is one shelf across every edition, so yesterday evening sits next to yesterday morning and you scroll back through the lot. Asking Pepper to run one on the spot works the same way — say which you mean ("run my evening brief") and it delivers that one.

Switching one off keeps everything it ever sent. Turn an edition off and it stops arriving and leaves the list; every brief it delivered stays in your archive, and its time and delivery settings are kept too. Add the same one back later and it picks up exactly where it was rather than starting blank. The morning brief is the exception in one way: it always stays listed, on or off, so it's never something you can lose the switch for.

Scheduled tasks for a room

If you own a room with Pepper (one you started — by email, group text, or in the web app — that includes Pepper and more than one person; see Rooms), you can point a recurring task at it: "every Sunday morning, run my dinner-ideas skill for the family thread." Each run then happens in the room: it uses the skills shared with that room and the room's shared documents, the result goes out by email to every member Pepper can reach that way (a web-app member with no email or phone on file won't get this send, though the run still lands in the room's own history), and anyone's reply-all lands back with Pepper with the result as context. A few things to know: only the room's owner can set this up (everyone in the thread gets each run, so it's the owner's call); the task has no separate delivery settings — the room's thread is where it goes; and for an email or group-text room, changing membership makes a new thread as far as Pepper is concerned, so the task needs pointing at it again — a web-app room's membership can change in place, so a task pointed at one keeps firing as people join or leave.

Reminders vs. to-dos

A to-do is an item on a list — see Todos. Give it a time ("remind me to call the dentist at 3pm") and it reminds you once, with Done and Snooze; give it none and it just stays on the list. A reminder that repeats ("every weekday at 9") or follows the sun ("at sunset every day") is a scheduled task, set up as described above.

Things to try

Last updated from Pepper 61a03fda7ffd1fb05c06c2699a8ecfd4ce3fc39d

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