Your first week with Pepper

Day one: the first run

By the end of Install Pepper, whether you use the guided setup or do it by hand, Pepper has pulled your messages once and passed npm run doctor, and launchd, the part of macOS that keeps programs running, is running it in the background. From then on it runs on its own:

It pulls new messages from Beeper, the app that brings your chat accounts together, every two minutes.
Every ten minutes it reads what came in and looks for things you owe and are owed.
Three times a day it pulls once more, then writes and sends a brief: a short numbered summary of what still needs doing and what was finished.

To see a brief straight away instead of waiting for the next one, send /brief to your Pepper bot on Telegram.

Saying hello on Telegram

Open the chat with your bot and send /start. Pepper replies "Pepper is on." with the list of what it can do. /help shows the same list at any time.

Pepper learns your first name from your chat accounts, and uses it in what it says to you and in its instructions to the model. A first conversation on Telegram, where Pepper asks about you and how you work, is planned. Until then, these steps are how you shape Pepper.

Tip

Start by adding your priorities. Send one message for each: priority: Close the Q4 budget; next: send Mira Chen the draft. They come first in every brief, after the headline.

Your first briefs

Briefs arrive at 07:00, 13:00 and 19:00 in your timezone. Change the times with PEPPER_DIGEST_TIMES and the timezone with PEPPER_TZ in .env, then restart Pepper.

Each brief is short and numbered, in this order:

Section	What it shows
Headline	One line on where to start, when there is something to start with
Priorities	Your ranked priorities, each with its next step
Yours	Your to-dos due within a week, plus up to three with no date; five lines at most
Needs you	Up to five things people need from you, with names and quotes
Waiting on others	How many things you are owed, and the two oldest
Check-in	Evening only: Pepper asks "Did you…?" about your to-dos due today or overdue. After two "not yet" answers, Pepper asks once whether to keep, date or drop one
Closed since last brief	Up to five things settled since the previous brief, with the quote when there is one
Footer	Old unread threads, items to review, and spending on the model today and this month

The morning brief adds a health line only when something is wrong, such as messages not syncing for 30 minutes.

Briefs has the rest, including what happens when Pepper wasn't running when a brief was due.

Acting on a brief

Under each brief are buttons: Listen reads the brief aloud, and each numbered to-do (in Yours, Needs you and the evening check-in; priorities have their own numbers and no buttons) has ✓ (done), ⏰ (tomorrow) and ✖ (not a task). You can also reply to the brief in words, using the item's number:

2 done, 3 friday, 1 not yet, drop 2, 4 next week
just done, when the brief has only one item

The full list of replies is on Telegram commands.

Teaching Pepper who people are

See who it knows. /people lists up to 25 people, VIPs first and then by how many messages each sent in the last 30 days.
Mark the people who matter. /vip Dana Reyes marks Dana on every network where the name matches. VIPs get a ★ in briefs and come first in the backlog offer, Pepper's once-a-day offer to clear old unread threads. /unvip Dana Reyes undoes it. If the name matches people with different names, Pepper shows their ids and asks you to use one.
Approve what it learns. Pepper picks up facts about people (a role, where they are based) and decisions from your chats. What you said yourself can be kept. Facts from other people stay marked as proposed until you keep or reject them on the Review tab of the dashboard, the Today page in your browser. Pepper won't keep facts about other people in sensitive areas, such as health, money or relationships, unless the words are your own (a word list decides what counts as sensitive, so it is not a guarantee, and the messages themselves stay in the archive).
Fix who a to-do is about. When you add a to-do ("remind me to…"), Pepper confirms it in a numbered line. Reply to that confirmation with 2 is about Sam Lee to change who item 2 is about.

Correcting Pepper

Pepper will get things wrong in the first days. Corrections are quick, and Pepper learns from them.

Not a task. Once you drop an item Pepper found, it won't be raised again from the same messages.
Noisy group. Send /chats to see chat ids, then /mute <id> so the group only appears in summaries and never as something that needs a reply, or /ignore <id> to drop it. /normal <id> undoes either.
Someone you want gone. /forget Theo Grant shows exactly what would be deleted and asks you to confirm. It cannot be undone.
Bad answer to a question. Send /new to start a fresh conversation, then ask again with more detail.

Note

Every Sunday at 09:00 Pepper sends a weekly review. It includes the number of items Pepper raised that you marked "not a task". When at least ten items came up and more than a fifth were not tasks, Pepper becomes stricter about which items it adds on its own.

By day seven

By the end of the first week you should see:

Briefs that mostly list things you agree with, and at least one item under "Closed since last brief".
A short priorities list you trust, and to-dos you add by text, or by voice note once speech-to-text is set up.
Your first weekly review, with this week's spending.

If briefs stop arriving or something looks wrong, run npm run doctor and see Troubleshooting.