Setup

Setting up Jane

About twenty minutes, most of it waiting for a mailbox to exist. Here is everything, so you can have it ready rather than hunt for it half way through.

Before you start

About your company

Company name — As you would like it to appear on documents Jane writes for you. e.g. Meridian Freight
Short name — Lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens. We use it internally to keep your data separate from every other customer’s. e.g. meridian-freight
Your timezone — Decides what “Thursday afternoon” means, when the morning summary arrives, and how business days are counted. e.g. America/New_York
Your email domain (optional) — How Jane tells a colleague from a customer. Defaults to the domain of the first address you give below. e.g. meridianfreight.com

About your people

Who may give Jane instructions — One address per person. Jane obeys these and nobody else, and she replies only to the person who asked. Each of them gets their own reminders and their own customers; you can add more later. e.g. alex@meridianfreight.com
Who may open the dashboard (optional) — Separate from the list above on purpose: being able to tell Jane what to do by email and being able to pause her from a browser are different powers. An administrator can see the whole organization, including colleagues’ documents. e.g. ops@meridianfreight.com

The mailbox

The mailbox Jane lives in — A real Google Workspace or Gmail account that belongs to her. You copy this address on the mail you want her to see. It should not be a person’s mailbox and it should not be a group or an alias — she needs to be able to receive and send as herself. e.g. jane@meridianfreight.com

You can use your own mailbox, or one we host. We recommend your own, and the reason is worth a sentence: if Jane lives at jane@yourcompany.com, your correspondence stays inside your own Google Workspace and we hold nothing but a token scoped to that one mailbox. If she lives on our domain instead, your mail with your customers passes through our systems, and you would be copying an outside address on customer threads — which your own compliance people will have a view about. We will host one if you would rather not create an account, but ask for it deliberately rather than by default.

If you want them

Call notes (optional) — If you use Granola, an API key lets Jane read the notes from your calls, answer questions from them, and remind you of what you agreed on one.
Video meetings (optional) — Google Meet needs nothing from you. Zoom needs an account we can connect, which is another approval step like the one above.

The three steps only you can do

Everything above is information. These are actions, and none of them can be done on your behalf — which is the point.

Create the mailbox
In your Google Workspace admin console, add a user for the address above. A standard licensed user — Jane needs to send mail, not just receive it.
Grant access to Gmail and Calendar
Sign in as that mailbox and approve the permissions. This is the only step that gives us access to anything, it is scoped to that one mailbox, and you can revoke it from your Google account at any time.
Send her something
Email the mailbox with a document attached, then ask her a question about it. If she answers, everything is connected.

What she can see

Only the mail you copy her on. She has no access to your inbox, your drive or anything else in your Workspace — the permission you grant is for the one mailbox you create for her.

Within that, two rules that matter more than they sound. A message you copy her on but do not address to her is watched, not answered: she will remind you about the thread and will not reply to it, however much it reads like a question. And where several of your colleagues use her, they share a knowledge base of company documents and nothing else — your correspondence, your reminders and your customers’ files stay yours.

One thing to expect

When you grant access, Google may show a screen saying the app is not verified. That is Google’s review process rather than a problem with the permissions, and we are going through it. Until it completes you can proceed via Advanced → Go to…, or wait for us to tell you it has cleared. We would rather say so here than have you meet it unexpectedly.

Get started