Get the most out of Beth
The more she knows, the better she gets.
Beth starts useful and gets better every week. She learns from what arrives in your inbox, from what you photograph, from what you tell her, and from every time you tell her she got something wrong. Here is how to give her the most to work with.
1. Show her the paper
Half of family life still arrives on paper, or as a picture of paper. Beth reads it. Tap the camera on any screen, or in the chat, and take a photo — or choose one from your Photos, which is how a screenshot gets to her.
Things worth photographing:
- The monthly school calendar from the fridge
- A screenshot of the sports schedule from the team app
- Permission slips, flyers and letters home
- A booking confirmation or appointment card
- A recipe, including a handwritten one — it goes into your own cook book
Several pages? Send them together.
Up to ten pictures are read as one, so a two-page newsletter or a season's schedule across three screenshots comes out as one set of dates.
Tell her what the symbols mean.
"The little book is library day." Say it once, and every library day on the calendar becomes its own item, with one tap to add them all.
She never fills in the blanks.
No year on the flyer? She assumes the next one and says so on the card. Not sure which child it is for? She asks. Cannot read it? She tells you, rather than guess.
2. Connect the inbox the school writes to
This matters more than anything else on this page, because it is where most of what Beth does begins. Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, Yahoo and AOL all work, and you can connect more than one.
She reads back to the start of the school year, 1 August, and then keeps watching for what is new. Dates inside an attached PDF are read along with the email. Anything already in the past is left alone.
Most of it never reaches the AI.
Newsletters you never open, receipts and promotions are set aside by ordinary rules first. Only what looks like real family logistics is read closely.
Tell her the school's name.
She looks the school up: the addresses its email comes from, its year calendar and its school day, so the school's messages are recognised from the first one.
3. Bring every calendar in
Google, Outlook and the calendar on your iPhone all come into one view. Leave out the ones that are noise — Birthdays, a shared work calendar — and Beth ignores them.
Your partner's calendar, without the app.
Send them a link. They choose busy times only or full details and sign in once — they never install anything. Beth can then tell when somebody else genuinely has the children.
4. Teach Beth
An inbox can tell Beth when practice is. It cannot tell her which sitter your children actually like, what each of them will and will not eat, or which day of the week is reliably the worst.
Teach Beth, in the menu, has short sets of questions for each of the nine areas — a few hundred in all — and fifteen to start with when you set up, allergies first. Answer three and walk away. Every question has Save, Skip for now (it comes back in a month) and Ignore (it goes away, and can be undone).
One answer reaches every area.
Tell her Mondays are hard, and it shapes Monday's dinner, the errands she suggests and when she looks for time for you. She shows you what she took from each answer.
Nothing is ever asked twice.
Nothing there is required, and an answer you give is never asked for again.
5. Tell her in passing
The easiest way, and most of what she learns. Just say it, the way you would to a person:
Emma's in size 13 now.
We've got Global Entry.
My mom does Tuesday pickups.
Liam can't have peanuts.
She never forgets.
What you told her in September is still there in May. Nothing drops off because it is old or because there is a lot of it.
An allergy counts the moment you say it.
She does not wait to confirm it. Recording one that turns out to be a dislike costs a slightly shorter list of dinners; the other way round costs a great deal more.
6. Tell her when she is wrong
This is the single biggest thing you can do during the trial. Every correction makes her better for you, and every report makes her better for every household after you.
- In the chat. "No, I meant Thursday." She takes it, and the team sees that she needed correcting.
- "Not what you needed?" under any answer, to say what went wrong.
- The report button, on every screen, for anything that looks broken.
- "How did I do today?" in the evening check-in. A Not quite becomes something she remembers in every conversation after.
You hear back.
When something you reported is fixed, Beth tells you: "Fixed — thank you."
The evening check-in is where she learns most.
It is the one moment in the day she asks rather than answers. Something said once is a remark; something said in four check-ins is a rule.
7. Decide how much she does alone
Each area can be set to:
- Watch — reads and learns, says nothing.
- Suggest — tells you what she found and waits. This is where she starts.
- Draft — gets it ready for one tap.
- Act — does it, then tells you.
Everything she does on her own can be undone.
It is listed on My Day under what Beth did, each with Undo.
She earns it.
Once you have accepted a few of the same kind of thing without changing them, she asks — once — whether she can stop asking.
Three things always ask.
Spending money, messaging anyone outside your household, and changing something you already put in your calendar. Whatever you set.
Ready when you are.
We are inviting households to the trial a few at a time.