Connections

Connections, under Reach in the main window, is everything Moe can read and act on for you: the apps already on this Mac, Google, and around 1,400 other services. Everything on it works while the Mac is awake; asleep, Moe is asleep too, unless you have Away.

The page#

The list on the left is in a fixed order. Thinking at the top is the brain row, the account Moe thinks with, with Working, Needs a sign-in or Starting…. Needs you appears, in amber, when a connection has broken. Yours is what you have connected. Your Mac is the apps already here: Calendar, Reminders, Notes and Contacts first. Popular is Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive and the rest of the everyday services. More on your Mac is the rest of what this Mac holds. Popular at work is Slack, Notion, GitHub, Linear and their kind. Everything else is the rest of the catalogue, and a line under it says how many more a search will find: the whole catalogue is one word away in the search box at the top. Advanced, folded at the bottom, holds the other ways in for people who know they need them, including Add a server by address… for your company's own service or one nobody has heard of. Check again at the foot re-reads everything.

Each row's second line is its state: Working (with checked just now on the detail pane), Needs you, Not available yet, Couldn't check, or, for something not yet connected, one line on what it does. Click a row and the detail pane says what Moe can do with it, which account is signed in (you can rename each account, work and personal), and the button that connects it: Sign in, Paste a key, Connect, Turn on, Add a mailbox, Link my phone…, or Add another once one account is in. Disconnect… is on the right: Moe forgets the sign-in and stops reading it; nothing at the service itself changes.

The first time you connect a source, a small sheet asks Let Moe learn from Notes and watch it for things you'd want help with?, with Yes or Not now; see Keeping up.

The apps on this Mac#

These need no sign-in, only the macOS permission each one names:

• Calendar — every calendar in Calendar.app, Google ones included.
• Reminders — what you still owe people, and adding one when you ask.
• Apple Notes — your notes, re-read every ten minutes.
• Contacts — who you mean when you say a name, and their number or email.
• Messages — what people have said to you in iMessage and SMS, every message including the ones recent macOS stores only in their formatted form. Needs Full Disk Access.
• Mail — the mail in the Mail app on this Mac, every account set up there, not only Gmail: inbox and sent, with the whole text of each message. Needs Full Disk Access, like Messages. When the same email also reaches Moe through Gmail or Composio, Moe thinks about it once, not once per route.
• Phone call history — who called and when, so you know who you missed.
• Recorded calls — what was said on calls your iPhone recorded, from their transcripts.
• Google Drive — the files Google's Drive app has synced to this Mac, read as files. No Google password.
• Google Docs and Sheets — documents you pick yourself in your browser, those and nothing else in your Drive; Pick more files… adds to them.
• Chrome browsing — the page you were reading, never your searches. Off until you turn it on; Turn on and Turn off are its buttons, and it is the one source that is opt-in for keeping ready as well as for learning.
• Gmail — your mail read directly over IMAP with an app password, never your Google password; Moe can read it and draft replies, and sending asks you first.
• My own Telegram and WhatsApp on this Mac — your own accounts; see below.

Google, and about 1,400 other services#

Moe reaches Gmail, Google Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Tasks and Meet, and around 1,400 other services, through Composio, a broker that holds the sign-in on your behalf. You connect one by clicking Sign in: a page opens, you sign in the ordinary way, and you are done, with no developer account to make and nothing to paste. Over a hundred services work that way, and they are the names you would expect: Gmail, Google Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Tasks, Meet and Photos, Slack, Notion, GitHub, GitLab, Jira, Confluence, Linear, Asana, Trello, ClickUp, Salesforce, HubSpot, Zendesk, Stripe, Square, QuickBooks, Zoom, Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, SharePoint, Dropbox, Box, Figma, Canva, Miro, Airtable, Mailchimp, Calendly, Typeform, YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit and dozens more, each with its own logo.

What is listed before you type. The services most people actually use, most used first: a Popular shelf for everyday life (Gmail, Google Calendar, Drive, YouTube, Outlook, Docs, Sheets, Maps, Photos, OneDrive, Notion, Instagram, Discord, Dropbox, Reddit, Canva…) and a Popular at work shelf (Slack, Teams, Zoom, GitHub, Salesforce, HubSpot, Jira, LinkedIn, Google Meet, Stripe, Figma…). Only services you can connect today are on the shelves: one sign-in, or a key from the service's settings. Everything else follows, still most popular first, and typing a name finds any of the around 1,400.

Always on. A few services need no sign-in at all: Yelp, Hacker News, OpenWeatherMap, AllTrails and GoDaddy's domain search. Their rows say Always on — nothing to sign in to, and Moe uses them whenever you ask ("find a coffee place near me on Yelp", "is memoe-shop.com available?"). There is nothing to connect or disconnect. Otter, Granola, Lucid, Descript and Mercury sign in on the service's own page, the same way as Gmail.

Pasting a key. Most of the rest give you a key on their own settings page, usually under a heading like Developers, Integrations or API. Click Paste a key and Moe asks the broker what that service wants, the field names are the service's own, so one may want a key and another a key and a subdomain, shows each field with the service's description of where to find it and a Where do I find this? link, and you paste and click Connect. The key goes straight to the broker, is never shown again, never written to a log, and Disconnect removes it there. A few dozen services offer neither a sign-in page nor a key; those end with Composio did not return a sign-in link, and Moe says so rather than pretending.

The first time, Moe asks you to sign in with Google first: its own sign-in, a plain "which account is this" screen, before the service's. Your connections belong to your Memoe account, so they follow you to your other Macs and to your cloud computer, and signing in once is what creates that account. The rows say Sign in with Google to connect until you have. Under the button, one line, By signing in you agree to the Terms and Privacy Policy, both linked. Signing in records nothing else: nothing you say is sent anywhere by it. If you connect nothing, you are never asked.

What you will see, and it is worth knowing in advance. The permission screen Google shows you says Composio rather than Memoe. That is honest, Composio is the service holding the sign-in, and it is the one real cost of this route. In exchange you never meet Google's developer console. Your mail and calendar requests travel through Composio's servers when Moe uses this route, and through Memoe's own server before that: it holds the Composio key, so your Mac never does, and it checks each request against your plan. Asking is free on every plan. Anything that runs on a schedule (a reminder that reads your inbox every morning, say) needs a paid plan, and every plan has an hourly and a daily limit on actions; past one, Moe says the limit is reached and when it resets.

A second account. Once a service is connected its button says Add another; sign in again there and it becomes a second account beside the first, a work one and a personal one, say. Moe can use both: say which one ("send it from my work address", "check my personal inbox") and it acts as that account. If you don't say, it uses the account Composio holds as your default, which is usually the one you connected most recently. Moe knows each Gmail account by its address, even one Composio never recorded a name for, so naming an address always reaches that account; name one that isn't connected and Moe says which ones are rather than sending from the default. Composio holds up to five accounts per service. At that limit, Add another says so, and disconnecting one you no longer use makes room. A sign-in you started and never finished no longer takes one of the five.

Moe prefers the broker. Where a service can be reached two ways, Gmail through the broker or through an app password on this Mac, Drive through the broker or through the Drive folder on this Mac, the broker's row comes first, and the Mac route sits inside it under Also: Use an app password instead, Read the folder on this Mac instead, Read documents you pick, on this Mac. One sign-in at the broker works on your Mac and on your cloud computer, which the Mac-only routes cannot promise; the Mac routes never leave your Mac, and where privacy matters most they remain the better path. Anything you connected either way stays under Yours.

How it behaves. Moe does not carry 1,400 services' worth of tools around with it. When you ask for something calendar-shaped, it searches for the right tool at that moment and runs it, so adding services does not make Moe slower or more expensive to think. If a service is not connected yet, Moe offers you a link rather than failing; sign in through it and Moe carries on with what you asked. Moe also ships with short guides to the Google services, which tool answers which question and which settings keep an answer small, and it applies the cheap settings for you unless you ask for the whole thing.

Asking is free. Watching is not. Connecting these services and using them whenever you ask costs nothing. What needs a paid plan is anything that runs on a clock: watching a mailbox for a particular sender, a calendar for changes, or the background passes reaching into Google on their own. On a free Mac that is stopped before the request is made, and Moe tells you once what it did not do. Ask for the same thing yourself and it happens immediately.

There is also a ceiling on how many requests Moe will make to these services, on every plan, so that something going wrong in the background cannot quietly spend a month's worth of requests in an afternoon:

You are very unlikely to meet it by asking questions. If you do, Moe says which window ran out and starts again at the top of the next one; nothing is disconnected. Moe reads which plan you are on from your account, and if it cannot reach us it keeps using the answer it last got for up to a month, so a few days offline costs you nothing.

GitHub, and the code on this Mac#

GitHub is in the catalogue and connects with one click, Sign in, through the broker. Connected, Moe can read repositories, issues, pull requests, releases, commits and code search, and it can also write: open a pull request, push a file, merge, comment. GitHub marks which of its tools write, so Moe asks you before any of them run, the same way it asks before sending a message.

Without connecting anything. If you use the GitHub command line (gh) and are already signed into it, Moe can use that sign-in as it stands. That path is read-only on purpose: it lists your repositories, your recent commits, your pull requests and issues, and searches your code, but never pushes, merges, comments or opens a pull request.

The repositories on this Mac need neither. Moe can list every git repository on your Mac with its branch and whether it has uncommitted work, and show the status, log or uncommitted changes of any one of them, which is often the fastest true answer to "where did I leave off".

Your own WhatsApp and Telegram#

Two rows on Connections are your own accounts, Moe reading and writing as you. They are different from the Telegram and WhatsApp on Message Moe, which are a bot you message and Moe answers.

• WhatsApp on this Mac. You link this Mac from your phone, the way you link WhatsApp Web: Link my phone… shows a code, and you scan it under WhatsApp › Settings › Linked Devices › Link a Device. That one link keeps a copy of your chats on this Mac, the ones your phone sends over when you scan and every one after while Moe is running. From it Moe can look back for what someone said, list who you talk to, find a chat by name, listen to a voice note, and write a message when you ask, asking you before every one it sends. Every message Moe reads there says who sent it to whom — you to them, them to you, or who wrote in a group — so Moe never tells you someone sent you a message you sent them. Looking a long way back (a month, a year) reads the newest messages up to its limit rather than failing. The moment your phone accepts the code, Moe says so and puts the code away; it then takes your recent chats from the phone and starts the link, and the row turns to "reading" by itself, with nothing to press. The row says which is true of the link: not linked yet; just linked and coming up, which takes seconds; linked, but Moe is not running; the link dropped (WhatsApp does that every few weeks, and you scan again); your chats still arriving; or reading, with how many chats it holds. A link you have only just made is never called a dropped one. Read the warning on the row first: linking a device this way is against WhatsApp's terms, accounts have been banned for it, and the link drops every few weeks. This row and the WhatsApp row on Message Moe are the same single link to your phone, one linked device, never two: scanning once gives you both.
• My own Telegram. Moe signs in as a linked device, the same as adding Telegram Desktop, so it can follow your conversations and write a message when you ask. Revoke it any time from Telegram › Settings › Devices.

Because the names collide, every screen says which one it means. Your own account is My own Telegram and WhatsApp on this Mac wherever it appears. Asked to send a Telegram message with no account signed in here, Moe says it is not signed in to your own Telegram, and that this is separate from the Moe you message on Telegram.

Asked whether it saw what you sent it on Telegram or WhatsApp, Moe on your Mac no longer answers "not connected" when its bot there is working. Your chats with the bot are their own conversation — Moe on the Mac does not carry them in its head — but it can look them up when you ask ("what did I just send you on Telegram?").

WhatsApp Business, in the catalogue, is something else: a company's account, the kind used to answer customers, reached through the broker. It cannot see a personal WhatsApp at all.

How Moe knows what is connected#

Moe answers "are you connected to my Gmail?" from one list with a part for each kind of connection: the broker's services, every account you have connected by name; what is on this Mac, each thing that is actually working, with the exact way Moe reaches it; the servers you connected directly; GitHub when the gh command is signed in; and the chat apps you can reach Moe from. A connection that needs a permission you have not given is left off rather than promised. A service connected one way is connected: Gmail, Calendar and Drive can each reach Moe through Composio or through this Mac, and Moe checks both before it says anything is not connected; tell it you have just connected something and it checks for itself rather than asking you to confirm. The list is rewritten the instant a connection is added, renamed or removed, and the conversation you are in picks it up on your next message.

The same list travels to your cloud computer, so Moe Away answers "check my connections" from it too: the services connected through Composio by name, the servers you added, and — marked as such — the apps that live on your Mac, which it can only ask your Mac about. Ask either Moe about a service you have connected, from Cloudflare to Notion, and it looks the service up through Composio before it says anything; a service that is not connected is reported as that, and Moe never starts a sign-in for you unless you ask it to connect something. If you ask your cloud computer before your Mac has sent the list across, it says so and still checks Composio for the service you named.