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 Moe can read back over, a small sheet asks Let Moe read Notes back and learn about you?, Yes, learn about me or Not now; see Memory.

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. Needs Full Disk Access.
• 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. Those are the ones listed before you type.

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 Moe 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 Moe. 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.

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 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. The row says which is true of the link: not linked yet; 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. 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.

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.