Your phone's reminders and contacts, read by your bot

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What this does for you

Beside your phone's calendar, any of your bots can:

• read your open reminders — ask "what do I still need to do this week?" and the bot reads the Reminders app on your iPhone (the tool is called read_phone_reminders);
• look someone up in your contacts — ask "what's Mads's number?" and the bot searches the contacts on your iPhone or Android phone by name, phone number or email address (the tool is called search_phone_contacts).

The bot reads through the Botseon phone app; nothing is synced or copied in advance, and the bot can never add, change, complete or delete a reminder or a contact this way.

Before you start

• You have the Botseon phone app, signed in. This is a feature of Botseon's hosted service; a self-hosted deployment has no phone app and never offers it.
• The app is open on your phone when the bot asks.
• Reminders are an iPhone feature: Android has no built-in reminders app for Botseon to read, so an Android phone shares its contacts and calendar only.

How it works

1. You ask a bot something only your reminders or contacts can answer, in a chat on any device.
2. The first time, your phone shows its own system dialog asking whether Botseon may read your reminders (or your contacts). Reminders and contacts are asked for separately, and each only when a bot first needs it — never when you install or open the app.
3. Once you allow it, the app hands the bot:
   • for reminders: each open reminder's title, due date, list and notes — at most 200, soonest due first, optionally only those due in a range the bot names (at most 92 days);
   • for contacts: each match's name, company, phone numbers and email addresses — at most 50 matches. Photos, addresses, birthdays and notes stay on your phone.

On Android, Botseon asks to read contacts only, never to write them.

When the bot says it cannot see them

The bot is told why in one fixed sentence and repeats it to you:

Refusing one does not affect the others: say no to contacts and your bot can still read your calendar and reminders.

Taking it away again

• iPhone: Settings > Privacy & Security > Reminders (or Contacts) > Botseon, and turn it off.
• Android: Settings > Apps > Botseon > Permissions > Contacts, and choose Don't allow.

The next time the app starts, or the next time a bot asks, the app tells Botseon the permission is gone, and from then on your bots are not offered that tool. Signing the phone out does the same.

What Botseon keeps

Each read is a short-lived request: what the bot asked for (a due-date range, or the name it searched) and what your phone sent back. It is kept for a day by default and deleted within seven days at the latest. Because a shared reminder list or a contact card can be written by other people, a run that read them treats that text as untrusted, the same as an email it read.

See also

• Your phone's calendar, read by your bot
• The phone app