Obok

Obok is a personal assistant for people who run small businesses, and it starts with the mail you already get. It reads your Gmail (each message once, to judge whether it concerns your business), follows what it finds as whole matters rather than single emails (unpaid invoices and meeting requests get the most polished handling today), writes the reply in your own voice, and never sends anything. You press send yourself, in your own mail app.

The replies you keep putting off, already written.

What it actually does

1. Reads your mailbox: the last 60 days of mail, read once each to see whether it concerns your business. What it finds is followed as a matter across replies: an unpaid invoice, a meeting being arranged, or another thread of your work. Invoices and meetings get the fullest handling today (reminders that escalate, gentle first, each timed per matter), and other matters are followed more plainly.
2. Writes a draft in your own tone, matched to how you have written before: a gentle nudge first, a firmer one when the silence continues, each timed by what the matter itself shows and each still yours to approve.
3. Shows you a card with the full draft, in the app or as a notification you can act on from the lock screen. Never a summary you have to trust; the whole text, before you decide anything.
4. Waits. Approve and your mail app opens with the draft loaded. Edit it first if you like; your version is what travels. Reject it and say why, and that reason becomes a proposed rule; confirm it once and Obok follows it from then on. A rule it merely guessed at never acts on its own.

You can also just tell it things ("always offer three time slots", "be warmer with regulars") in plain language, and they become rules it follows and you can inspect.

What Obok does with your Google account

Obok connects to Gmail and Google Calendar. Two of the permissions it asks for reach your data, and both are read-only:

Google's consent screen will also list two sign-in permissions, openid and email. They carry no access to your mail or calendar: they tell Obok which account just connected, so your threads are not filed under a stranger's. They are named here because the consent screen names them, and a page that promised "exactly two" would have you reading a third and a fourth at the precise moment you are deciding whether to trust this.

Obok never sends. There is no send path in it, and you press send yourself, in your own mail app. What we can ask for depends on the provider, and we would rather be exact than tidy. With Google we ask for read-only access, and a stored connection found to carry send permission is refused rather than used. With Microsoft, drafting in your own mailbox requires write access, so we ask for that, and it does not include sending. Where a provider issues one password covering everything, as Apple does, we hold that password, read only with it, and contain no code that sends. So "draft-only" is enforced by the permissions we never ask for where that is possible, and by the absence of any sending code everywhere.

What is stored, how long, and who else sees it is set out in the privacy policy.

What it remembers, and how to see it

Everything Obok has learned about how you work is written in plain language, in one list you can read. Not an opaque model of you, but sentences like "never propose meetings before 10am". You can edit any of them, switch any of them off, delete them, or export the whole lot as JSON. A rule Obok guesses at stays inert until you confirm it.

There is a single switch that stops it proposing anything at all, plus a finer one per connected mailbox: "stop reading this account" without disconnecting it.

What it is not

The honest part

To find your overdue invoices, Obok needs to read your mailbox, and mail permissions are all-or-nothing, so the access you grant is broader than what it uses. It reads only the last 60 days, and an AI reads each new non-bulk message once to judge whether it concerns your business; only matters that do are kept: the extracted facts (amounts, dates, who said what), never the rest. That is wider than the two things Obok handles best: any matter of your work can be followed, and invoices and meetings are simply the ones it handles most completely today. That is our restraint, not a limit the permission imposes.

The text of the threads it works on is sent to Anthropic's Claude to write the drafts. It is not used to train anything. Your mail connection is stored encrypted on our server rather than on your phone, which is where it should eventually live.

All of that, and the rest of it, is in the privacy policy, and in more detail than most products would print.