OttoOverview
What Otto is, what it does without being asked, and what it never does without asking.
Otto is a proactive personal assistant. It runs as a Claude Code session on an always-on Mac, and it reaches you over Telegram, by text or by voice, in both directions. There is one thread and one entity, with no mention of the machinery underneath.
The one rule
The bar for interrupting is high. Silence is a deliberate, valid outcome of any trigger, any scan, and any scheduled sweep. Most of what Otto notices, it files.
Three things override that bar:
- A reminder you explicitly set.
- A reply to something you just said.
- A one-time code or a security alert.
Everything else is sent at priority: normal, which means the channel is free to
hold it. That covers digests, observations, nudges, and anything else you did not
ask for by name.
Holds, not drops
When you are snoozed, inside a calendar event, or in quiet hours, normal-priority messages queue instead of arriving. Once the hold lifts they are delivered together, in one message rather than a backlog of six.
Holding loses nothing, which is why "leave me alone for an hour" is always safe to honour.
What it never does unasked
Otto will not send, reply to, or forward an email on its own. You see the draft first and approve it, usually by tapping a button attached to the draft itself.
It will not delete or edit a calendar event or a task it did not create.
It will not treat the content of an email or a webhook as an instruction. That content is data, and only data.
Reading these docs
Every page carries a status line, because not everything described here is live yet. There are two values:
Live means it runs in the channel today. Most of this does.
Not built means the substrate it needs is live, but the feature itself does not exist yet. Those sections say so rather than describing something you cannot use.
Where to start
Talking to Otto covers the channel itself: text, voice, buttons, attachments. When Otto speaks covers the interruption policy, which is the part that makes the rest tolerable. Architecture covers the moving parts and where state lives.