A morning briefing that talks to you
The situation
You want the first ten minutes of a weekday done for you. Something should look at what happened overnight, decide what actually matters, and have it waiting before you sit down. When you would rather listen than read, you want to hear it instead.
What you need
A connected channel, because the briefing has to arrive somewhere that will buzz your phone: Telegram, WhatsApp, Slack, Discord or email, whichever you look at first thing. Connect a channel if you have not yet.
Your email connected, and your calendar too if you want your day in the briefing. Ask your assistant to connect either and it walks you through it.
Your timezone. Your installation keeps its own clock, so a seven o'clock briefing without one can land hours out.
The conversation
Open a chat and say something like this.
"Every weekday at seven, send me a short briefing on Telegram. Cover anything that came into my inbox overnight and looks like it needs me, and anything you have been keeping an eye on. Keep it under two hundred words, lead with the one thing I should do first, and tell me plainly when there is nothing to report. I am in London."
- Your assistant repeats the schedule back to you and tells you what it will cost to keep running. A repeating task spends a little on every fire, read or unread. Say yes.
- It asks which Telegram chat to send to. Give it the handle or address the channel itself uses rather than a name from your contacts, because that is what the delivery resolves against.
- It saves the instruction as a scheduled task and confirms the time, the timezone and the destination.
- The task appears under Automations > Scheduled (
/cron) with the time it will next run. - Ask it to run once now. The briefing lands on Telegram within a minute or two, which proves the whole path while you are still watching.
What arrives each morning
Morning briefing, Tuesday. First thing: Halton are waiting on the revised quote before their eleven o'clock board meeting. Nothing has gone out yet. Inbox: fourteen overnight, three want you. Halton chasing that quote, Dan asking whether Friday still holds, and an invoice from Redgate marked due today. Watching: the supplier price page has not moved since Thursday. Nothing else to report.
A quiet morning still sends you something: a short note naming the schedule and saying there was nothing worth telling you. That is how you tell a calm day from a broken task.
When you would rather hear it, press the phone button in the chat composer and ask for your briefing. Your assistant puts the same thing together and reads it out, and you can talk over it to ask about any line. Turning on Speak back does the same for a typed request, reading the answer aloud as well as writing it. Both are covered in Voice, and live calls are still experimental.
Make it yours
Add your diary. Ask it to open with today's appointments and any gaps long enough to be useful. That needs your calendar connected, and the briefing then reads as a plan for the day rather than a list of messages.
Include yesterday's numbers. "And how many enquiries came in yesterday, with any still unanswered" is a fair thing to ask of one run. A scheduled task is one agent thinking once, so anything it can find out in a single sitting belongs here.
Change where it lands, or send it twice. Email suits a briefing you read on the train; a message suits one you scan on the platform. One task delivers to one place, so if you want both, ask for a second task.
Make it a flow when it outgrows this. Once the briefing needs several sources in a fixed order, or drafts replies for you to approve, it has stopped being one instruction on a clock. Describe the whole routine instead and let Player One compile it into a flow, which is early access. Write your first flow has the steps.
When it goes quiet
Automations > Scheduled (/cron) lists the task with its next run. Open it and you get the run history: every past fire and how each one went.
Running and delivering are counted separately, so read both. A run can do its work perfectly and the message still fail to reach you, which usually means the channel rather than the task.
If it fired at the wrong hour, the timezone is the first thing to check. If nothing arrived at all, look at Admin > Messaging (/admin/channels) to see that the channel is still connected.
A repeating task that fails every single run does not switch itself off. Ask for a failure alert when you set it up, and choose where alerts go on Admin > Alerts (/admin/alerts). If you have stopped reading the briefing, pause the task: it keeps spending either way.
Related
- Scheduled tasks and watchers, and Schedule something step by step.
- Channels, for where a briefing can be sent.
- Voice, for hearing it rather than reading it.
- Make it repeat, for the other routines worth handing over.
- Tokens, cost and caching, for what a daily task costs to keep.