One-time reminders and an alert when a reply arrives
For everyone who works with an AI employee
Ask your AI employee in plain words to remind you once or to repeat a task until a date. It can also tell you when the reply you are waiting for arrives in Gmail.
Why it matters
Follow-ups happen when they should, without anyone keeping a list. When your AI employee offers to check back later, it can now set a real reminder for it, and an important reply reaches your chat within minutes.
- Before
- Your AI employee could only set scheduled tasks that repeat, so an offer to let you know later had nothing behind it.
- Now
- Your AI employee sets one-time reminders and end dates, tells you within minutes when an expected Gmail reply arrives, and lists everything in your time zone.
What you get
- One-time reminders: anywhere from five minutes to 90 days ahead, such as a call to return on Friday morning.
- Scheduled tasks with an end date: a weekly report or a daily check repeats until the date you set, then finishes by itself.
- An alert when a reply arrives: with your Gmail or Google Workspace inbox connected, hear when someone answers, from one address, from a whole domain or in the thread of an email you sent. Auto-replies and bounces count too.
- Replies that already came in: if the reply arrived shortly after you wrote, your AI employee tells you right away instead of waiting for the next one.
- Within minutes: each matching reply reaches your chat within minutes, and replies that arrive together come in one message.
- Follow-ups in the same conversation: your AI employee can reply inside the Gmail conversation it follows up on, so the other person sees one thread.
How to use it
Ask in your own words
In the chat with your AI employee, say what to remind you of and when, or how often a task repeats and until when.
Example Remind me on Friday at 9:00 to send Harbor Works the revised quote.
Ask to hear about a reply
With your Gmail or Google Workspace inbox connected, say whose reply you are waiting for: a person, a whole domain or the thread of an email you sent. If your AI employee says it needs full access to your email, run
/google-authonce and accept: the alert then starts by itself.Example Tell me when anyone from acme.example answers my proposal.
See everything you set
Type
/routinesto see each reminder, scheduled task and reply alert, with its next run and its end in your time zone.Pause or remove one
Type
/routine offwith its number to pause it,/routine onto turn it back on and/routine deleteto remove it.
Good to know
- A reply alert lasts two weeks unless you ask for another period, up to 30 days. It ends after ten updates or on its last day.
- Reminders that already ran and tasks past their end date show as finished in your list.
- If your inbox cannot be read for an hour, your AI employee tells you and says what brings it back.
Updates to this feature
Scheduled tasks with nothing to report keep your chat quiet
A scheduled task run with nothing to report adds no message, no notification and no unread count, and your task list shows it as nothing to report.
A reminder you ask for once now comes once
A one-time reminder runs once at the moment you named and is then marked finished, while a request to repeat stays a repeating scheduled task.
A scheduled task missed during a sign-in problem runs once it works
A scheduled task missed because of a sign-in problem runs once, within minutes of the sign-in working again, when its time was in the last 12 hours.
When a scheduled task can't run, the people who can fix it are told
The people who manage a scheduled task's AI account get a notice in VEP, and the task's chat keeps a short line about what happened.
When one AI account fails, other AI employees' tasks keep running
Only the affected AI employee's tasks pause, you are told which ones and why, and they switch back on by themselves after its AI account is reconnected.