User Guide

Getting started

AssistOwl pulls your email, calendar, contacts and tasks into one calm workspace, with an AI assistant ready to help with any of it.

Create an account from the home page using your email and a password — there's no credit card required to start. Once signed in you'll land on the main workspace.

The three-panel layout:

• Left rail — coloured tabs to switch between Home, Inbox, Tasks, Calendar, Contacts and other sections, with Settings and Help at the bottom.
• Centre — the working area for whichever section you're in.
• Right panel — the AI chat assistant, available everywhere. You can collapse it with the arrow icon to give the centre area more room.

Themes live in Settings. Pick from a warm light theme (Classic Lotus), a high-contrast dark theme (Professional Dark), a crisp blue theme (Executive Blue) or a bold high-energy theme (Vivid) depending on what's easier on your eyes.

Mobile vs desktop: the app is fully responsive. On smaller screens the left rail collapses and the AI panel slides in from the side, so you can still use everything from a phone or tablet.

Today board & smart inbox

The Today view is your morning starting point. Instead of dumping every unread email into a long list, AssistOwl reads your inbox and groups messages into a few clear buckets so you know what actually needs your attention.

• Reply now — important messages waiting on you. Use the Follow-up chip to draft a reply via AI.
• Reply today — things that can wait a few hours but shouldn't slip past the day.
• Decision — emails that need a choice from you rather than a reply. The AI can summarise these.
• FYI — informational messages you can safely archive in bulk.

Click any item to open the full email. From an open email you can star it, mark read or unread, or delete it.

Each triage row also has quick chips to turn the email into a Task, schedule a Follow-up, or send it straight to your calendar with Add to Cal.

Shortcuts & command palette

Press ⌘K (or Ctrl+K on Windows) anywhere in the app to open the command palette. From there you can search emails and contacts, jump to any section, or start common actions like composing an email — without touching the mouse.

That's the only shortcut you need to remember — everything else is a click away.

AI chat assistant

The AI assistant lives on the right side of the app. Type a question or instruction and it answers using whatever context is helpful — your emails, calendar, tasks, contacts and notes.

General vs Workspace mode. The assistant runs in two modes:

• General — answers using its general knowledge only. Good for quick questions where you don't need it to look at your data.
• Workspace — pulls in your real emails, events, tasks and contacts so it can act on them. Use this when you want it to summarise a thread, draft a reply, find a meeting, etc.

Each reply shows a small mode badge so you always know which one was used. If the assistant decided to switch you into Workspace mode automatically, you'll see an option to undo that switch on the same reply — handy if you wanted a generic answer instead.

New conversation. Start a fresh conversation any time from the top of the chat panel. Past conversations are saved in your history so you can reopen and continue them later.

Voice mode. Hit the microphone icon to talk to the assistant out loud. It can also read replies back to you, which is great when you're driving or on the move.

Real-time web search

When a question can only be answered by looking something up live — current news, today's prices, recent events — the assistant pulls fresh information from the web before replying.

You'll know it happened because the reply will cite the sources it used and link to them. You don't need to enable anything; it kicks in automatically when the question needs it.

AI that improves with use

The longer you use AssistOwl, the better the AI assistant gets to know you. It observes patterns in how you work — the tone you prefer, the way you like things summarised, the topics that matter most — and applies those preferences automatically to every reply.

When the assistant draws on something it has learned about you, a small Applied your saved preferences chip appears on the reply. This is the AI confirming that it is using your habits, communication style and context — not starting from scratch.

How the memory builds up. Preferences come from two places:

• Your notes — anything saved in the Notes section acts as long-term context. Job title, preferred sign-off, key clients, writing rules — put them here once and the assistant picks them up on every request without you repeating yourself.
• Conversation patterns — after each session the assistant quietly distils signals about your preferences (tone, format, length) and carries them forward into future conversations.

Multi-step reasoning. For complex questions the assistant can plan a short sequence of steps behind the scenes — searching the web, reading a page, checking your emails or tasks — before composing a single, grounded answer. You see a brief summary of the steps it took; the final reply is always clean and concise.

Email → Calendar in one click

Many emails end up needing a meeting. Open any email and click Schedule in the toolbar (or the Add to Cal chip on the Today board) to hand it straight to the AI assistant.

The assistant reads the email, extracts the relevant details, then checks your calendar for a free slot and creates the event for you. It will confirm what it's about to book before committing — so you stay in control.

The event lands in your connected Google or Microsoft calendar once you confirm.

Tasks

Tasks live in their own section but flow in from everywhere else in the app:

• From email: the Create Task button on any email turns it into a to-do, keeping the email as context.
• From chat: ask the assistant something like "remind me to call Sarah on Friday" and it adds the task for you.
• Manually: click + New Task at the top of the Tasks panel to add one yourself with a title, description, due date and priority.

Filter tasks by All, Today, Upcoming or Completed. Click the checkbox to mark a task done. Priorities are colour-coded (red for high, amber for medium, grey for low) so you can scan the list at a glance.

If the AI can't pin down a due date for a new task, it'll ask you in plain language rather than guess.

Calendar

The Calendar section shows your events from every connected calendar in one place. By default you'll see the next few days at a glance, grouped under each date — your day view. You can also widen the lens to a week view when you want to spot patterns across a longer stretch of time.

Each event row shows the title, the time, and (when set) the location. Click an event to open its full details. To create a new event, ask the assistant in plain language — for example "schedule a 1-hour meeting with Sarah next Tuesday at 2pm" — and it will add the event straight to your connected calendar.

AI Scheduling Assistant. The Auto-schedule task dialog hunts for free slots inside your working hours and drops a focus block on your calendar. You pick how long the block should be — 30 min, 45 min, 1 hour, 90 min or 2 hours. If there's no room, you'll see a friendly message pointing you to either pick a shorter duration or extend your working day in Settings → Scheduling.

Contacts

Contacts gathers everyone you've corresponded with into a single address-book-style list. Each row shows a coloured initial avatar, the contact's name and email, and a small badge with how many emails you've exchanged with them.

• Letter tabs let you jump straight to a name by its first letter — handy when your contact list is long.
• Pin your favourites so the people you talk to most stay at the top, even when you're searching or filtering.
• Recent email context — clicking a contact surfaces the most recent emails from them on the right, so you can pick the conversation back up without digging through your inbox.

Contact detail panel. Click any contact to open a detail view with two tabs: Email History shows your most recent emails with that person — click any to open it; Notes — shows notes from your Notes section that mention this person, so related context is easy to find without leaving the contact view.

You can also use the assistant to act on a contact directly — ask it to draft an email, schedule a meeting or create a task with that person, and it'll fill in their details for you.

Notes

The Notes section is a place for free-form text — meeting jottings, project briefs, anything you'd normally keep in a sticky note. The editor supports headings, bold, italic, lists and undo/redo with the standard keyboard shortcuts.

What makes notes special in AssistOwl is that the AI assistant uses them as memory. Anything you save in a note becomes background context the assistant can draw on when answering future questions, drafting replies or summarising. Write down things like your job title, key clients or preferred sign-off and the assistant will use them naturally.

Drive sync. Click Sync to Drive on any note to save it as a .md file in your Google Drive or OneDrive under an AssistOwl/YYYY-MM-DD/ folder. Parent folders are created automatically — no manual setup needed.

Send to Chat. Hit Send to chat on any note to drop its full content straight into the AI panel as the opening message — useful for asking the assistant to improve, translate or act on something you've written.

WhatsApp bot

Connect your mobile number in Settings → WhatsApp and you can chat with AssistOwl from your phone, just like any contact.

1. Enter your number with country code.
2. Tap Send verification code.
3. Type the 6-digit code we send you and tap Verify.

Once connected, anything you'd ask the assistant in the app you can ask over WhatsApp — including email summaries, scheduling, and adding tasks. You can disconnect at any time from the same settings tab.

If delivery starts failing, a banner appears at the top of the app telling you what's wrong (e.g. signature mismatch or unregistered number). Click Open settings to re-verify, or check the Inbound activity and Outbound failures diagnostics to see what's been sent and received in the last 24 hours.

Smart reply variants

When drafting a reply, the assistant can offer several versions in different tones — for example friendly, formal or concise — so you can pick the one that fits the relationship. Click the variant you like and it becomes the draft; tweak any wording and send.

Follow-up nudges & weekly briefing

Follow-up nudges appear when an email you sent hasn't had a reply for a while. They're gentle suggestions to chase up, not noisy reminders, and you can dismiss any nudge you don't want to act on.

The weekly briefing rolls up what happened across your inbox, calendar and tasks — what got done, what's coming up, and where the assistant noticed patterns worth acting on.

Proactive hints

As you work, the assistant may offer small hints — for example "want me to draft a reply?" when you've been staring at an email for a while. They're meant to be helpful, not pushy.

• If a hint isn't useful, dismiss it and it won't come back during the same conversation.
• Hints are designed to re-show after you start a fresh conversation, so you'll still see relevant suggestions next time you sit down to work.

Personas & AI sessions

Personas are saved prompt profiles — for example "act as my marketing copywriter" or "be a concise tech reviewer". Switching personas changes how the assistant talks to you without having to re-explain context every time.

Open the persona menu in the chat panel and pick Browse library to explore the Persona Library — a curated gallery of ready-made personas across marketing, sales, writing, finance, support, and design. One click adds a persona to your list; from there you can activate, edit, or delete it like any other custom persona.

AI sessions group related conversations together by topic, so a long-running project stays in one place rather than getting lost in the general chat history. New sessions get a smart auto-generated title based on what you discussed.

Inbox Cleanup

The Cleanup tab in the navigation rail surfaces emails the AI has already classified as either spam or irrelevant — so you can review and remove them in bulk rather than deleting one at a time.

• Spam (rose section) — junk, phishing and scam messages. Safe to move to Trash.
• Irrelevant (amber section) — legitimate but unwanted bulk mail: newsletters, social notifications, marketing. Safe to Archive.

Tick individual rows or use the group checkbox to select a whole section, then click Archive selected or Trash selected. A confirmation dialog shows a split count before anything moves. Both actions propagate to your real Gmail or Outlook inbox immediately.

Scan more emails. By default AssistOwl classifies recent messages. To dig further back, click Scan last 30 days (or Scan another 30 days after the first pass). Each run extends the look-back window by 30 days up to a year, and a toast tells you how far back it reached.

Always clean this sender. Click the shield button on any row to create a rule that automatically routes future emails from that sender straight to the Cleanup queue, so you only deal with them once per sender.

AI email tags

Tags let you label emails with your own categories — Client follow-up, Finance, Urgent — and then filter your inbox by those labels. The AI assigns the best-matching tag automatically as each email arrives.

• Create tags in Settings → Email Tags. Give each tag a name (up to 40 characters), an optional description to guide the AI's matching, and one of 8 colour presets.
• Manual override — click the tag icon on any email row in the inbox to assign or clear a tag yourself.
• Filter by tag using the tag dropdown in the inbox toolbar to focus on one category at a time.

Webhook automations

Automations let you connect AssistOwl to any external service that accepts an HTTP request — a Zapier webhook, a Slack channel, your own API, or an n8n workflow. You define the endpoint; AssistOwl fires it.

Set them up in Settings → Automations. Each automation has a name, an optional description, a URL, an HTTP method, optional headers and a JSON payload template.

Triggering from the AI. Ask the assistant something like "run my Slack notification" and it will match the automation, show you a confirmation dialog with the details, and fire it only after you approve. Nothing is sent to an external endpoint without your sign-off.

Sources & summaries

Sources turns AssistOwl into a personal news digest. Add any RSS feed or webpage URL and the app monitors it in the background, delivering regular AI-written summaries to you.

• Add a source from Settings → Sources. Paste an RSS URL or webpage address and give it an optional tag to group related sources (e.g. Industry news or Competitor watch).
• Summary schedules control when you receive the digest. Choose frequency (daily or weekly), the days, time of day, your timezone, and whether delivery goes to in-app notifications and/or WhatsApp.
• Source notifications appear in the notification bell in the app header — each one is a short AI summary of the latest items from your sources, with links to read more.

Tap Run now on any schedule to generate and deliver a summary immediately, without waiting for the next scheduled time.

Plans & billing

AssistOwl offers a free starter plan and paid tiers with more capacity and features. To see your current plan, change tier, or cancel:

• Open Settings from the bottom of the left rail.
• Or, when you're signed in, head straight to the billing page.

From the billing page you can Switch to this plan, Manage billing in the Stripe customer portal, or Cancel plan. Cancellations take effect at the end of the billing period; you keep access until then.

Privacy & GDPR

All AI processing runs in the European Union via IONOS Cloud — a GDPR-compliant European provider. Your emails and calendar entries are not used to train AI models.

You can export the data we hold about you, and you can delete your account and personal data on request. Disconnecting Google or Microsoft from Settings revokes our access to those services immediately.

Read the full Privacy Policy for the complete picture.

Getting help

Stuck on something or spotted a bug? Email us at info@inforzone.com and we'll get back to you. There's also a Send feedback link in the beta banner at the top of the app for quick comments.

For the legal bits, see our Terms of Service.