Assistant Mode

Assistant Mode turns Obvious into a personal assistant that works across your workspace — monitoring your projects, reading your calendar and email, and handling tasks before you think to ask.

Assistant Mode is in beta. Email help@obvious.ai to request access.

What Assistant Mode is

It's not a chat interface you open when you need something. It's a presence that stays aware of what's happening and surfaces what matters.

The assistant lives in a dedicated project in your workspace. It builds a private profile of your work patterns, preferences, and context over time, and uses that to personalize everything from how it communicates to when it surfaces information.

How to open the assistant

Click Assistant in the sidebar to open it. It opens docked to the side of your screen by default.

From there, use the display-mode menu in the assistant's header to change how it's shown:

• Tile to sidebar — docked to the side of your screen. The default view.

• Float in panel — a draggable, resizable panel that floats over any page in Obvious. Drag it by the header bar to reposition it; drag any edge or corner to resize it. It snaps to a corner of your screen and remembers its size and position across sessions.

• Enter full page — a full-screen view at /assistant, with more room to work.

You can switch between all three at any time without losing your place in the conversation.

Setting up the assistant

The first time you open the assistant, you'll step through a short onboarding flow. Your progress is saved automatically — if you close the panel mid-flow, you'll pick up where you left off.

The flow has six steps, each with a Back, Skip (where relevant), and Continue button. Press Enter to advance at any step.

Step 1: Meet

An introduction to what the assistant is and what it can do. Click Continue to proceed.

Step 2: Why

A brief explanation of how the assistant builds context about you over time. This step is informational — click Continue when you're ready.

Step 3: Shape your assistant

One screen, titled "What do you want to call your Assistant?" Two things are actually asked here:

1. Enter a nickname for your assistant in the text field. This is what it'll be called in conversation. If you leave it blank, Obvious picks one for you based on your name.

2. Optionally enter a home city or timezone below the name field. It's used to time your daily briefing.

A small color-swatch button sits next to the name field. It isn't a prompt you're asked to respond to — your assistant already has a default color applied when the screen loads. Click the swatch only if you want to open a color picker and choose a different one.

Click Continue once you've named your assistant — the only required field. The Continue button stays disabled until you've entered something.

Step 4: Set a communication tone

Choose how you'd like the assistant to communicate. Five options are available, from terse to expressive:

Select the tone that fits how you like to work, then click Continue.

Step 5: Connect services

Connect external services the assistant can read and act on — calendar, email, CRM, and others depending on what's available in your workspace.

Click Connect next to any service to authorize it via OAuth. A popup opens to complete the connection. If your browser blocks popups, you'll see a prompt to allow them for Obvious.

This step is skippable. You can connect services later through Settings → Connectors.

Step 6: Set channel priority

Choose which channels the assistant uses to reach you, and in what order.

Connected channels appear as draggable cards. Drag them to set your preferred priority — the assistant uses the order you set when deciding how to notify you. Channels that aren't connected yet appear below the draggable list.

Three channels are supported:

• Slack — Requires your Slack account to be linked. Click Connect on the Slack card if it isn't already.

• Telegram — Requires Telegram to be connected.

• Email — Always available. Toggle it on to enable email notifications.

To reorder connected channels:

1. Grab the drag handle (the vertical dots icon) on the left side of a channel card.

2. Drag it up or down to the position you want.

3. Release to drop it in place.

The order you set here determines which channel the assistant tries first when it needs to reach you outside of Obvious — for example, when delivering your morning briefing or flagging something time-sensitive.

This step is skippable. Click Skip to finish setup without configuring notifications, or Continue to save your channel preferences and complete onboarding.

What happens after setup

Once onboarding is complete, the assistant creates a dedicated project in your workspace. This project holds your conversation threads and the assistant's private notes about your work context.

The assistant is ready to use immediately. A few things start running in the background:

• Dossier Bootstrap — A one-time automation that scans your sent email and calendar history to seed the assistant's understanding of your work patterns. It reads structural data only (senders, recipients, event titles, attendees) — not message content or event descriptions.

• Daily Briefing — A scheduled automation that runs each weekday morning. It scans your email, calendar, and workspace activity overnight, then delivers a concise summary of what matters today directly in the assistant chat.

Using the assistant

Type in the assistant chat the same way you'd message a colleague. A few things worth knowing:

The assistant dispatches work to your projects. It doesn't create documents or run data queries directly. When you ask it to do something that requires those tools — drafting a doc, analyzing a sheet, building a report — it spins up a thread in the relevant project and reports back when it's done.

It reads across your workspace. The assistant can search documents, sheets, presentations, and past conversations across all your projects. Ask it where something is, what someone said, or what changed while you were out.

It can read and compose email. If you've connected an email account, the assistant can search your inbox, summarize threads, and draft replies in your voice. It shows you a preview before sending — it won't send anything without your approval.

It can read your calendar. With a calendar connected, the assistant can pull today's schedule, help you prep for meetings, and flag conflicts or upcoming deadlines.

Morning briefing. Each weekday morning, the assistant delivers a briefing in the chat covering what matters today: priority items, your schedule with context, overnight developments, and a 48-hour look-ahead. The briefing arrives at 9:00 AM in your local timezone by default.

Tip: The assistant's suggestions get better over time. The more you interact with it — and the more services you connect — the more context it has to work with.