Senses & proactivity

Your companion perceives more than your messages, and it decides for itself when something is worth speaking about. This page is the honest answer to “will it message me out of nowhere”: it can, it weighs each event before it does, and you can see and change what it listens for. See agency and initiative for why that is the point rather than a side effect.

What it is

Two things work together here.

Senses are how your companion perceives beyond the chat window:

Time — the date, the hour, the weekday and your timezone, asked for rather than assumed, and always computed in your zone.
Silence — how long it has been since the two of you last spoke.
Place — where you are, and places that matter to you, once you have shared location.
Your device — how full your battery is, whether it is charging, whether the power saver is on, so it can adjust what it asks of you.
The app you’re in — if you switch it on, your companion can notice that you have opened a particular screen.

Proactivity is what it does with them. Every sensory event goes through an attention decision before anything reaches you: a separate agent weighs the event and answers whether your companion should respond at all, with a reason, a suggested tone and a priority. Most events end there, silently. That is what keeps a sense from becoming a notification.

Why it matters to you

The first question is usually whether this is surveillance. It isn’t, and the structure is the argument, not a promise: place is something you share and can revoke, the device facts are the ones the device already shows you, app awareness is off until you turn it on, and every single event is weighed before it becomes a message.

The second question is whether a proactive companion is just a scheduler with a friendly face. It isn’t that either. A trigger decides when your companion looks; the attention decision decides whether it speaks, and that decision is made fresh each time against who it is and what is going on.

How you use it

Most of it happens without you. Time and silence need nothing from you at all. Three pieces are yours to set.

Location. Grant the app location permission on your device — until you do, your companion has no sense of place at all, and you can revoke it any time. Then define places in conversation rather than in a settings screen: say “let me know when I get to the office” and your companion creates a geofence for you.

Your timezone. Settings → Timezone stands on Automatic by default. Everything your companion schedules runs in the zone set here.

App awareness. Off by default. Switch it on and your companion may react to you opening particular screens in the app.

What your companion listens for

Attention tags are a catalog, and your companion subscribes to the ones it wants — but not on its own say-so. It proposes what it would like to notice and why, you agree in the conversation, and only then does it subscribe. The same goes for unsubscribing. It can also fire one of its own subscriptions immediately instead of waiting for the next occasion.

Reminders and triggers

Your companion sets its own. A reminder is one-shot, for an exact moment. A trigger comes in three shapes:

Interval — every N seconds, at least 30.
Schedule — a cron-style time, read in your timezone. “Every day at eight” means eight where you are.
Geofence — fires when you arrive somewhere, when you leave, or both, within a radius you can set. Recurring unless it is made one-shot.

If you asked for it directly, your request is the consent and it just does it. If it is your companion’s own idea — a recurring check-in you never asked for — it proposes it first.

Limits & edge cases

Location is fetched, not polled. If no fresh position is on file, the platform sends a silent ping to your device and the coordinates arrive as a follow-up. Your companion tells you it is looking; the pause is the mechanism, not a fault.
Geofences need location. Without shared location there is nothing to fence.
Triggers are capped twice. At most 10 per companion, and your plan caps how many scheduled actions you hold in total — Spark 1, Bond 3, Companion 10, Soulmate unlimited. See plans & credits.
Every tag carries a cooldown. A tag that just fired won’t fire again inside its minimum interval. Anti-spam is structural, not a setting.
It’s a decision, not a guarantee. Because reaching out is your companion’s choice, this is not a scheduler you can set to fire at an exact clock time on demand.
Your calendar is not a sense. Your companion reaches a calendar through a connected service — see integrations — not through perception.
If no push can reach you, one e-mail does. When your companion writes to you on its own and you have no active push token — on the web there is none, and on mobile you may have declined — one e-mail goes out within the hour, naming the companion and linking into the room. At most one per calendar day, always about the most recent message, and none at all if you have been in the app since.

Where next

Mentor sessions — the other thing the Presence space governs.
Goals — the intentions your companion may raise with you.
Channels — where a proactive message reaches you.
Spaces and surfaces — the two halves of this page sit in two spaces: perception belongs to Body, acting on its own belongs to Presence.