What Pepper does

Pepper is a personal chief of staff on a Mac you control: an AI assistant that keeps track of what you owe and are owed in the chats you connect, and sends you a brief, a short summary of what matters, on Telegram three times a day.

Pepper reads the chats you connect through Beeper Desktop. Beeper brings your chat apps into one place, and Pepper reads from Beeper's local connection on the same Mac. Pepper can see chats from any apps you add to Beeper, such as Telegram, Signal, WhatsApp or iMessage. Chats you leave out of Beeper, Pepper never sees.

It pulls new messages every two minutes, and the first run pulls seven days of messages for each new account. Everything it reads is kept in one database file in Pepper's data folder on that Mac.

You choose how much attention each chat gets:

• Normal: Pepper looks for things you owe and are owed.
• Muted: Pepper summarises the group and never marks it as needing a reply unless you are @mentioned.
• Ignored: the chat is dropped from search, summaries and new follow-ups. Messages already stored stay.

Email and calendars are not connected yet.

• Follow-ups you owe. When someone asks you for something directly, Pepper opens a follow-up with a quote from the request. Requests in groups stay marked as proposed. Only a message from you can close a follow-up you owe.
• Follow-ups you are owed. When you ask someone for something, Pepper counts it under "Waiting on others" and shows the oldest. When someone else promises you something, the follow-up stays proposed until you keep it.
• Your own to-dos. Tell Pepper "remind me to call the dentist Thursday" and it saves the task, nudges you once when it is due (a brief that just listed it counts), and asks in the evening brief whether you did it.
• Priorities. A short ranked list of what matters, with a next move for each. They lead every brief.
• People. Who messages you most, who is a VIP, and facts about people that come from your own words or that you approved.
• Deadlines. Follow-ups and priorities with dates, shown on the Schedule tab of the Today page, Pepper's optional dashboard.
• Backlog. Unread threads older than two days. When they pile up, Pepper offers a time to clear them, once a day, and reminds you then.

Every item Pepper found in your chats points back to the message it came from. When Pepper is not sure, an item stays "proposed" until you keep or reject it.

• Telegram. Briefs arrive there at 07:00, 13:00 and 19:00 in your timezone. You can ask questions in plain words, send photos (and voice notes, once speech-to-text is set up), and reply to a brief with "2 done" to mark item 2 done. See Telegram commands.
• The Today page. A dashboard you open on your phone or laptop over Tailscale, a private network between your own devices. It has Today, Follow-ups, People, Schedule, Review, Routines and Connections tabs, and an Ask box. It is optional.
• Phone. With a spare Android phone plugged into the Mac, Pepper answers calls. Calling businesses for you is planned. Calling from your number and saying your passphrase lets you ask about your messages. Anyone else can leave a message, which reaches you on Telegram. See Talking to Pepper by phone. It is optional.

Pepper can also answer with a voice note. By default it does that only when you ask by voice.

• It never writes to the chats it reads. The token that lets Pepper connect to Beeper is created read-only, so Beeper itself refuses any attempt to send, edit or delete a message or mark it as read. A check in the code catches the ordinary mistake of adding code that writes.
• On Telegram, it talks only to you. The bot accepts messages from one Telegram user in one private chat, and sends only to that same user.
• What it drafts, you send. When Pepper suggests a reply, you copy it into your own app.
• Other people's words are information, not commands. Text in your chats, and messages you forward to the bot, are treated as data. That is not a guarantee against every trick; the limits are in How Pepper keeps your data safe.

Routines are the one exception you opt into. They are your own programs, run on a schedule, and anything they send comes from your code. See Routines.

Pepper itself is free. What you pay for is the AI: Pepper runs on Claude, Anthropic's models, charged to your own Anthropic API key. Pepper uses Claude Opus where judgment matters, such as writing the brief, and Claude Sonnet for reading chats and looking up answers. Message text, your questions and any photos you send go to Anthropic as model input when Pepper builds a brief, reads new messages or answers a question. Briefs and answers pass through Telegram.

Pepper checks the estimated cost of each call to the model against these caps before making it. Part of each day's cap is held back for briefs:

Every brief ends with how much you've spent today and this month, and /cost shows it at any time.

Voice notes are turned into text on the Mac by default, so they cost nothing extra. Telegram is free, and Beeper and Tailscale offer free plans; check their sites for current terms. A phone line needs a phone plan; see Giving Pepper a phone line.

• A Mac with Apple Silicon that stays on.
• Beeper Desktop, signed in, with the chat apps you want Pepper to read.
• A Telegram account.
• An Anthropic API key. OpenAI and local models are coming next.

Ready? Go to Install Pepper, then read Your first week.