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Skills

A skill is a saved playbook — a multi-step routine Pepper can run when you ask for it by name. Some come built in; you can also save your own.

In the web chat, every skill is also a slash command, named after the skill itself — /meal-planning, /find-todos, and the same for anything you save. Type / and keep typing to narrow the list, or press Tab to complete the name; taking one fills the message box with the request rather than sending it, so you can add a detail ("…for four people") before you press send. See Apps.

Built-in skills

Just ask for any of these in plain language:

If you've connected GitHub (see Connecting your accounts), Pepper also picks up a small set of repo-aware skills. These are the named routines; GitHub covers the wider set of GitHub questions you can just ask directly, including listing your repositories.

Saving your own skills

If a skill has a lot of ground to cover, Pepper sometimes has to stop before it's fully done — it says so plainly rather than reporting the job as finished, even if something you mentioned along the way (a spending limit, say) sounds like it could be the reason it stopped. What it found up to that point is still worth having, just don't assume it's the whole answer.

If you find yourself walking Pepper through the same multi-step routine repeatedly, you can save it as a skill so you can just ask for it by name next time. "Save this as a skill called Friday report." Pepper will draft the routine, show it to you, and save it once you're happy. After that, "give me my Friday report" runs it.

You can also customize a built-in skill for yourself, and manage all your skills (create, edit, delete) in the Skills app in the web app — open it from the menu, or say "show me my skills"; it opens inside the conversation, so you can keep talking to Pepper about what you're looking at. Built-ins are listed alongside your own, and Override on my account starts you a copy of a built-in you can edit, with the original left untouched underneath — delete your copy later and the built-in comes back. If you live in a terminal, pepper skills does the same from the command line (see The command-line app).

One kind of skill appears without you writing it. When you approve the tools on a connector (see Connectors), Pepper saves a skill named after that server, so the connection is usable straight away instead of waiting on you to write the routine that reaches it. It shows up in the Skills app like any other and it's yours to edit; approving more tools on that server later won't overwrite what you've written. Two things to know if you go further than editing it: deleting it will bring a fresh one back the next time you approve tools on that server, and renaming it works like deleting it and writing a new one — so a later approval round makes a second, freshly-generated skill alongside your renamed copy. If you want it under your own name, it's usually less confusing to leave the generated one alone and write your own skill against the same server.

You can also just ask to see what a skill says. "Show me my Friday report skill", "what does the morning brief actually do?" — Pepper reads the routine back to you without running it, so asking to see one costs you nothing and starts nothing. That works for built-ins as well as your own, and it's the natural first step before asking for a change to one.

An edit to one of your own skills can be undone. Every time a skill of yours is changed, the version before that change is kept — the last twenty of them. So if an edit went wrong, or a skill lost something it used to say, you can ask: "show me the history of my Friday report skill" lists the earlier versions with when each was written and the first few lines of it, and "put the version from Tuesday back" restores one. Restoring saves what was there first, so restoring the wrong version is undoable too. This is for skills you wrote or customized; Pepper's own built-ins aren't editable, so there's nothing to undo.

If you delete a skill that one of your scheduled tasks runs (see Reminders & scheduling), Pepper shows you those tasks first and lets you remove them at the same time. Deleting the skill on its own doesn't stop them — they'd keep firing on schedule with nothing to run. Ask Pepper to delete a skill and it'll tell you the same thing, and can cancel the tasks for you.

Research projects

A research project keeps a brief, a ledger of what Pepper found, a report, and your steering notes across one or more runs. Creating one is manual-only: it does not create a background job or a future schedule. Ask Pepper to run it when you want the work done; it gives you a receipt and works asynchronously, so you can keep chatting. Pausing or resuming a project never runs it and never creates a schedule. A steering note waits for the project's next run; if you sent one to the wrong project, ask Pepper to take it back, which works until that run has read it.

Product research is the built-in skill that does the work inside a project set up to compare or track products, gear, or brands — it fetches and verifies prices, specs, and reviews, keeps a per-item ledger of what it found (and what's still unconfirmed), and writes the project's comparison and recommendation. "Start a research project comparing robot vacuums under $500", "add the new model to my monitor research and re-run it." It never buys anything or adds to a cart. A one-off "what's a good pair of running shoes?" is answered directly in the conversation — this skill is for an ongoing, multi-run comparison you've set up as a project, not a casual question. It's a private, one-on-one skill: it isn't available in a room.

Web research does the work for a project about anything else — a company, a person's public professional background, a topic. Each run searches the public web, reads the best sources it finds, and writes a short Summary with every point linked to the page it came from. It sticks to public, professional information: it won't look up anyone's home address, family, health, religion, politics or personal finances. Like product research, it runs inside a project you've set up, not for a quick question in chat.

If Pepper turned something down and you've changed your mind, just say so. Tell it why it's worth another look and it goes back on the list to be considered again. That's something only you can ask for — Pepper won't undo a rejection on its own partway through a run.

If you later want recurring research, ask for an exact cadence and local time. Pepper first shows the project, cadence, and timezone and gives you a one-time confirmation token. Reply with that token exactly, in the same text conversation, within 15 minutes; Pepper then creates that specific schedule. The token works once and cannot be used by someone else or in another conversation. Schedule confirmation is text-only, so use chat rather than voice.

In a room. Where research projects are switched on for rooms, a room has a Research tab next to its other apps, showing the room's projects: the report, the ledger, past runs and the steering notes. Any member can steer a project (including "Not this one" on an item), take an item, or ask Pepper to reconsider one it turned down, and the steering shows who wrote it. Only an owner of the room can create a project, run, pause or resume it, change its brief, filters or skills, or set its schedule; everyone else sees the project without those controls.

Pepper will not start another run while it cannot verify that an earlier worker stopped. If a run is interrupted or needs recovery, the project stays protected while an operator verifies it is safe to continue; Pepper does not silently retry or overlap research writers. Your existing project history, report, ledger, and prior run records remain in place.

Sharing a skill with a room

If you're in a room with Pepper (by email, group text, or in the web app — see Rooms), you can share one of your own skills with that room: "share my dinner ideas skill with the family thread." After that, anyone in the thread can use it there — "Pepper, run the dinner ideas" works for every member, and the skill can read and update the room's shared documents.

Things worth knowing before you share:

Ask "which of my skills are shared, and with whom?" (or about one in particular) and Pepper lists them back. Taking one back is the same kind of sentence: "stop sharing dinner ideas with the family thread." In the web app, a room's info page also opens its Skills: every skill shared with that room, with Stop sharing on the ones that are yours, and a Share one of yours list of your own skills the room can take, each with a Share button. Pepper's built-in skills aren't in that list; sharing one of those with a room is up to the room's owner.

"Stop sharing my dinner ideas with the family" revokes it, and "which of my skills have I shared?" lists your shares.

When a skill makes sense

Skills are for repeatable, multi-step work. For a one-off task, just ask Pepper directly. For a single fact to remember ("I'm vegetarian"), that's your profile, not a skill (see Memory & preferences). Pepper may offer to save something as a skill when it notices you'd likely want it again — you can always say no.

Things to try

Last updated from Pepper 61a03fda7ffd1fb05c06c2699a8ecfd4ce3fc39d

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