Rooms

A room is a conversation you share with other people and Pepper. Everyone sees the same thread, Pepper answers the room rather than each person privately, and the room keeps its own apps, notes, skills and schedule, separate from your own.

There are two kinds. An open room lives in the Pepper app (on the web or the iPhone app): you name it, add and remove people, and it can have topics, apps and its own settings. A bridged room is an email thread or a group text that includes Pepper: its people are whoever is on the thread, and Pepper takes part from inside your mail or messages app.

Starting a room

By email, CC: put the Pepper address shown in Settings on the To or Cc line along with the other people. Pepper recognizes the room from who else is on the message, sees who sent each one, and replies to everyone on the thread.
By group text: add Pepper's number, the Pepper number shown in Settings, to a group message along with the other people. It's a US and Canada thing, carried as MMS, and holds you and up to seven other people — see below for what happens past that.
From the web app: press the new-conversation button next to Messages in the sidebar. Add people by email or phone number, or leave that blank and add people once the room exists; name it if you'd like ("Ski house"). Leave the name blank and the room is named after the people you added — rename it from its info page any time. It opens as a live conversation right there in the web app for anyone you added who already has a Pepper account. Someone without one can't open the room itself until they sign up — whether they can still take part by replying to the thread in the meantime follows the same email-vs-phone rule as any other room (see "Who can take part" below).
Reply-all keeps Pepper in. Once a room exists, replying to everyone (not just the sender) keeps Pepper on the thread for the next message too. Drop it back to a reply meant for one person and Pepper isn't on that message.
BCC is different — it's a private 1:1, not a room. BCC'ing Pepper hides its involvement from the other recipients on purpose, so Pepper honors that: it replies only to you, never to the thread, and no room gets created. Use CC (or To) when you actually want Pepper taking part in front of everyone.

Adding people

Leaving an open room for good: any member can leave an open web-app room from its info page — Leave this room at the bottom. An email or group-text thread under Other conversations can't be left this way, and nobody can be added to one from the web app: its people are whoever is on the thread. Unlike archiving, leaving actually removes you: the rest of the room keeps going without you, and you'd need a new invite to come back. If you're the only owner, make someone else an owner first (or remove the other members) before Pepper will let you leave.

In the conversation

Acting on one message. In a web-app room, hover over a message (tap it on a touchscreen) to bring up quick reactions and Reply, which quotes it. Its ⋮ menu adds Copy message link, plus Edit and Delete on your own messages. In the iPhone app, long-press a message to bring up reactions and the actions menu directly. Paste a copied message link anywhere and opening it jumps straight to that message, highlighted, in the app on iPhone or the web app otherwise.
Pictures in a web-app room. Attach an image to a message that asks Pepper something — "what's wrong in this screenshot?" — and Pepper sees the picture along with your words, up to eight per message, though very large photos may not all fit. It only sees pictures on the message it is answering, not ones posted earlier in the room, so attach the picture to the question itself. A picture sent with no words at all doesn't get a reply. If a picture can't be fetched, Pepper says so instead of guessing what was in it.
Remembering the room: Pepper keeps track of a room's earlier conversation, so a thread you come back to later isn't starting from scratch.
Blocking someone. A message's ⋮ menu has Block this person, and so does the ⋯ menu on a room-mate's row in the room info page's People list. A block is private and one-way — it collapses that person's messages for you and stops their pushes reaching you, without removing them from the room or telling them — and you can undo it any time from Settings → Blocked.
Reporting someone. A message's ⋮ menu has Report message, and a member's entry has Report person…. You pick what's wrong (harassment, spam, impersonation, and similar categories) and can add a note; the app confirms it with a reference number for your report, and an email copy follows when your account has an email address. Reporting a message hides it from you from that moment, and a report can block the person at the same time.

Finding and tuning your rooms

Your room list. Your rooms are listed under Messages in the sidebar, below your conversation with Pepper; go to /groups for the complete list — who's in each one and when it was last active. A room you haven't posted in for a while folds under a quiet Show inactive row rather than crowding the active ones, and one new message brings it back. Email and group-text threads are gathered under one Other conversations row (with a dot when one of them has something new); click it to see them, and it opens on its own when you're in one. Click a room to open it with its topics listed beneath it; click the room you're already in to fold its topics away, and again to bring them back.
Archiving a room. Archive a room from its room info page to tuck it out of your list until you unarchive it — that only changes what you see, not the room itself or what anyone else sees.
Notifications per room. A room's info page has a Notifications setting for that one room, applied to push notifications on all your devices: All messages, @mentions only (a push only when someone @mentions you), or Muted (no pushes at all). Either way the room stays in your list and you still see new messages when you open it. It only matters while notifications are on for you at all (Settings → Notifications); with them off everywhere, the setting is greyed out. A room starts at All messages unless its owner has picked a different starting level for new members — an owner sees a New members start at setting on the same page, which applies only to people who join after it's set and never changes anyone already in the room. Your own choice always wins over that starting level, and it stays with you if you leave a room, so if you're added back later it's still what you set.
Notifications per topic. You can set the level for one topic from its ⋯ menu (Notifications…) in room info's Topics list, so a busy topic can be Muted or @mentions only while the rest of the room stays at the room's level. A topic's setting overrides the room's in both directions — a muted room with one topic set to All messages still notifies for that topic, and an All messages room with one topic muted stays quiet for it — and Room default clears it so the topic follows the room again. Like the room setting, it's yours alone and applies on every device.
Room info. Room info is where a room's own things open from: its Skills, its Artifacts, its Scheduled tasks (an owner of the room can pause and resume them there), and each app the room has installed.

Scheduling together

Scheduling together: ask Pepper in the thread to find a time — "when can we all get dinner this weekend?" It checks each member's free/busy for the window you're considering (busy times only — never what the events actually are), and, if the time you asked about is taken, suggests the next few times everyone it can see is free (working hours, in the room's time zone, naming anyone it couldn't check), then offers a booking link everyone can pick from. The times on that link have the busy time taken out for everyone whose calendar Pepper could read — so a slot is already clear for that part of the thread. Anyone Pepper can't see (someone without a Pepper account, without a calendar connected, or who doesn't share their calendar with the room) isn't in that calculation: they get counted by picking, which is the point of the link — they choose a time that works for them rather than being asked to type out their availability.
Pepper won't commit someone else's time without being told to. Being able to see a calendar tells Pepper when a person is free; it doesn't tell it they want a meeting then. So it offers the link rather than choosing for the room — unless the room says so in the thread ("any time works", "you pick"), in which case it books the time directly, puts the event on the thread owner's calendar, and invites everyone automatically. A booking made on the link does the same thing.
Change or cancel a meeting the room booked. "Push the standup to 10" or "cancel Thursday's dinner" updates or cancels an event the thread itself created, instead of booking a second one. Pepper only touches an event it has on record for that thread — point it at the wrong one and it lists what it does know about so you can say which. A time change gets the same free/busy check as booking; a clash says who's busy and asks before going ahead.
You can also just ask for the link: "send them a link to grab 30 minutes" and Pepper replies on that thread with one — useful when the other person isn't going to negotiate over email. It mails the thread again when they book. See Booking pages.
If it's a call, say so: a room event gets a Google Meet link when the thread is planning a video call — say "let's do a call" or ask for a Meet, and the invitation everyone receives is one they can join from. A dinner or an outing gets no link; if it's not clear from the thread which one you mean, Pepper asks rather than guessing. As with one-on-one events, if your account doesn't allow Meet links Pepper still books the time and says there's no link instead of pretending there is one.
Your calendar in rooms: rooms see the free/busy of calendars you own unless you change it, per calendar, under Rooms see in Manage calendars — free/busy only ever covers calendars that also count as busy for you. Each room can override that on its own info page. Anyone Pepper can't see gets asked directly instead.

A room's own things

A room can have apps of its own. Ask Pepper in the thread — "can we have a shared to-do list?" — and it installs the app for the whole room. If it also has a room in the web app, any member can also add or remove one from the room's info page instead of asking: Add apps there opens a gallery of every app the room can have, each with a line on what it's for and an Add button. A room's app is the room's: the shared list is separate from your own private one, everyone in the thread can add to it and see it, and nothing from your private list is carried into it. Ask what a room has ("what apps do we have here?") and Pepper lists what's installed and what else it could add; ask it to take one out and it does, for everyone. The change takes effect from the next message. Not every app does something extra in a room yet — installing one you can't use in the thread still works, it just doesn't add anything to what Pepper can do there until it's ready. Apps are a room thing: in a one-on-one chat you already have all of them.
Sharing a skill, scheduling a room task, or moving a document into a room are things you ask for in your own 1:1 conversation with Pepper, naming the room — "share my dinner ideas skill with the family thread" — rather than in the room thread itself; the room thread doesn't have those tools, only the room's own members do once you've set them up.

Your rooms from your own chat

Reading your rooms from a one-on-one chat. In your own conversation with Pepper you can ask about any room you're in, without opening it — "what rooms am I in?", "what's been said in Ski house since yesterday?", "what's on the shopping list we share?". Pepper can list your rooms (name, how many people, how recently each was active; archived ones aren't listed), show one room's people and agents with their roles, its topics and when each was last active, its installed apps, and its shared skills and scheduled tasks, and find a topic by name across all your rooms. It can read a room's messages, oldest first, as you would see them in the room: the newest ones by default, one topic at a time (the main topic unless you name another), only what's new since a time you give, or further back a page at a time. And it can read a room's own copy of one of its apps, such as the shared list, plan or calendar, or just the items that mention a word. Reading doesn't change anything in a room; posting into one is the next item, and sharing a skill or scheduling a task for a room is the separate thing described under "A room's own things" above. It only ever sees what you can see, so a room you're not in (or have left) reads as not found rather than empty, and if Pepper can't check a room just now it says so instead of telling you the room is quiet. This works in web chat, the API, one-on-one SMS and one-on-one WhatsApp (on SMS and WhatsApp, only from a phone number you've verified on your account with the one-time code; from an unverified number Pepper still answers but can't read your rooms), and in a one-on-one email when your email domain enforces DMARC and the message passes it — Pepper only reads your rooms back to you over email when it can be sure the mail came from you, so mail from a domain that doesn't publish an enforcing DMARC policy still gets an answer but not your rooms. It isn't available on phone calls, in an email or group-text thread with other people, or in scheduled tasks and briefs, where Pepper will tell you it can't read your rooms from there; ask again from web chat, SMS or WhatsApp.
Posting in a room from a one-on-one chat. You can also ask Pepper to say something in a room for you — "tell the Ski house we'll be an hour late", "let Chris know the watch fix is tracked down". It posts as you, in the room you share with that person and the topic that fits, rather than emailing or texting them. If you gave the exact words ("post 'running 10 late' in Family"), it posts them straight away. If Pepper wrote the wording, it shows you the draft and where it will go and waits for your yes in your next message; a post it wrote shows a small "via Pepper" label beside your name so the room can tell (the words themselves are only what you confirmed). Drafts you don't confirm lapse after a day. Posting the same thing to more than one room asks first, and Pepper posts at most three messages per request and twenty an hour. After a post, the topic counts as read up to where you'd already caught up. You can also ask Pepper to fix or take back a post it made for you this way ("change that to …", "delete what you just posted"), which happens straight away and as you (if Pepper words the change rather than using your exact words, the post gets the "via Pepper" label too, and keeps it), or to start a new topic in a room, which it always shows you first and creates only once you say yes. It can't edit or delete things you posted in the room yourself. Pepper won't post into a topic that carries an email or text thread with people outside the room, and if the room can't be reached it tells you nothing went out rather than sending it another way. This works wherever reading your rooms does (the item above): web chat, the API, one-on-one SMS and WhatsApp from a verified number, and one-on-one email that passes DMARC.
Changing a room's list from a one-on-one chat. You can ask Pepper in your own chat to add to or change a room's shared to-do list, subscribe a room's Feeds, Podcasts or Following app to something, or make or update one of the room's artifacts — "add sunscreen to the Ski house to-dos", "tick off the booking on the family list". The change lands on the room's copy, not your own, and Pepper says which room it used; for an app, the room sees the same "updated" line under your name it would if you had made the change on the room's page. The room has to have the app installed (except for artifacts), and if it doesn't, or Pepper can't tell which room you mean, nothing is changed and it says so rather than changing your own list instead. Following teams or leagues in a room's Sports app goes straight in too. A few changes take something away from everyone in the room, so Pepper asks first: unfollowing a feed, unfollowing teams, leagues, events, athletes or countries in the room's Sports app, replacing the room's meal plan for the week (which also swaps the shopping lines the old plan added), and changing an app's settings. It tells you exactly what would change in which room ("stop following Chelsea", or which planned meals and how many shopping lines would go) and does it only once you say yes in a later message. The offer lapses after a day, asking again after it's done changes nothing, and if someone changes the same thing in the room before your yes, nothing is changed and Pepper says so, so you can ask again against what's there now. Anything else that removes something from a room, such as deleting items from its list, still has to be done in the room for now.
Your rooms in your morning brief. Your brief gets a short Your rooms section: who mentioned you, replied to you or asked a question in your rooms since your last brief (up to five, most pressing first, each with the room, topic and time), and a count of the rest and of rooms that were only chatting. Muted rooms are left out, so is anyone you've blocked and anything you reported, and in a room set to "@mentions only" only mentions and replies count. It never marks anything read. If Pepper couldn't reach your rooms when it put the section together, the brief says so in one line rather than leaving them out silently. To turn this off, along with the short note about your rooms Pepper adds when you come back to chat after a while, untick Room news under Settings → Notifications (it takes effect straight away, so a section already put together for your next brief isn't sent); you can still ask what's new in a room any time.

Things to try

Plan dinner with the family. In a room with your family, ask "when can we all do dinner next week?" and Pepper finds the times that work for everyone and sends a link to pick from. Nobody's time is booked without their say-so.
Keep one list for the house. In a room with your family or housemates, ask "can we have a shared to-do list?" and everyone in the room can add to the same list.
Catch up on a room without opening it. In your own chat with Pepper, ask "what did I miss in the family thread?" and it reads the room's recent messages back to you, or "what's left on the house shopping list?" for the room's shared list.
Try it: "What's been said in my rooms since yesterday?"