Personal assistant roadmap: build reliable outcomes and simplify the product

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Mu is a personal assistant, focused on consumers, families, friends and groups. Home is the dashboard, rather than a restriction on what the assistant can help with. It should feel dependable: ask for an outcome, receive useful help quickly, and trust it to finish. This roadmap consolidates the agreed lists of what should exist and what the everyday product does not need.

These are gap-closing issues, not a claim that all underlying capabilities are absent. Audit current main and reuse existing services, records, schedules and recent fixes. Priorities are proposed implementation order, not production incident severity.

P0 — make the core trustworthy

• Make delegated tasks finish reliably and reply where they started #1565 — Make delegated tasks finish reliably and reply where they started
• Measure and reduce time to useful answers #1566 — Measure and reduce time to useful answers
• Execute service commands directly with predictable natural-language shortcuts #1567 — Execute service commands directly with predictable natural-language shortcuts
• Give the assistant one editable personal context and memory #1568 — Give the assistant one editable personal context and memory
• Make calendar and email connections dependable and understandable #1569 — Make calendar and email connections dependable and understandable
• Establish one assistant experience across Home, chat and email #1570 — Establish one assistant experience across Home, chat and email
• Make actions reviewable, permissioned and verifiable #1571 — Make actions reviewable, permissioned and verifiable
• Finish the shared design system and mobile assistant experience #1572 — Finish the shared design system and mobile assistant experience

Start with task completion and latency measurement (#1565, #1566), alongside mobile/shared UI (#1572). Use measurements to guide direct execution (#1567). Personal context, connections and authority (#1568, #1569, #1571) support the unified experience (#1570).

P1 — make it useful every day and simplify the product

• Simplify navigation and give Home, Inbox, Tasks and Events distinct jobs #1573 — Simplify navigation and give Home, Inbox, Tasks and Events distinct jobs
• Deliver a personal morning brief with one coherent scheduling policy #1574 — Deliver a personal morning brief with one coherent scheduling policy
• Add reminders, follow-ups and change monitoring with quiet delivery #1575 — Add reminders, follow-ups and change monitoring with quiet delivery
• Support meeting preparation, scheduling and follow-through #1576 — Support meeting preparation, scheduling and follow-through
• Turn email into actionable triage and safe reply drafts #1577 — Turn email into actionable triage and safe reply drafts
• Cache web research and index saved page content #1578 — Cache web research and index saved page content
• Unify personal search and organise projects and deliverables #1579 — Unify personal search and organise projects and deliverables
• Make document and attachment workflows dependable #1580 — Make document and attachment workflows dependable
• Make onboarding demonstrate a real personal-assistant outcome #1581 — Make onboarding demonstrate a real personal-assistant outcome
• Give users control over personal data, memory and generated copies #1584 — Give users control over personal data, memory and generated copies

Navigation simplification can proceed alongside P0. Deliver the personal brief after context, connections and task delivery work. Then reminders, email triage and meeting assistance. Cached sources and personal search support projects and reusable deliverables. Apply data lifecycle controls as each feature lands, not as an optional cleanup at the end.

Suggested dependencies:

• Deliver a personal morning brief with one coherent scheduling policy #1574 depends on Make delegated tasks finish reliably and reply where they started #1565, Give the assistant one editable personal context and memory #1568, Make calendar and email connections dependable and understandable #1569.
• Add reminders, follow-ups and change monitoring with quiet delivery #1575 depends on Make delegated tasks finish reliably and reply where they started #1565, Make actions reviewable, permissioned and verifiable #1571, Deliver a personal morning brief with one coherent scheduling policy #1574's delivery preferences.
• Support meeting preparation, scheduling and follow-through #1576 and Turn email into actionable triage and safe reply drafts #1577 depend on Make calendar and email connections dependable and understandable #1569, Make actions reviewable, permissioned and verifiable #1571 and Make delegated tasks finish reliably and reply where they started #1565.
• Unify personal search and organise projects and deliverables #1579 builds on A search that scans is a bug: put mail, recall and chat on the index #1472 and Cache web research and index saved page content #1578; Make document and attachment workflows dependable #1580 supplies attachment/deliverable UX.
• Make onboarding demonstrate a real personal-assistant outcome #1581 demonstrates completed workflows from Establish one assistant experience across Home, chat and email #1570, Make calendar and email connections dependable and understandable #1569 and Deliver a personal morning brief with one coherent scheduling policy #1574.
• Give users control over personal data, memory and generated copies #1584 applies across memory, caching, attachments and generated activity.

P2 — extend proven workflows

• Support voice interaction as another assistant input and output #1582 — Support voice interaction as another assistant input and output
• Provide practical day, travel and household assistance #1583 — Provide practical day, travel and household assistance

Voice builds on #1487 with the same assistant and task paths. Household/travel workflows compose the foundations; they do not justify more disconnected services or automatic booking authority.

Explicit simplification and removal work

• Simplify navigation and give Home, Inbox, Tasks and Events distinct jobs #1573: reduce prominent service destinations; separate the purposes of Home, Inbox, Tasks and Events; remove repeated histories and generated filler.
• Establish one assistant experience across Home, chat and email #1570: remove mandatory agent selection and accidental global specialist defaults.
• Simplify navigation and give Home, Inbox, Tasks and Events distinct jobs #1573 and Make onboarding demonstrate a real personal-assistant outcome #1581: move agent/model administration, tools/API references and developer controls out of everyday flows and onboarding.
• Simplify navigation and give Home, Inbox, Tasks and Events distinct jobs #1573: keep conversations, people and small groups central to the home experience. Make public discovery and generated publishing optional; simplify their presentation without removing the social purpose or user data.
• Deliver a personal morning brief with one coherent scheduling policy #1574 and Add reminders, follow-ups and change monitoring with quiet delivery #1575: avoid a procession of automatically enabled briefs, digests, weather/market updates and check-ins; provide coherent schedules and delivery controls.
• Execute service commands directly with predictable natural-language shortcuts #1567: remove permanent shortcut panels, model-backed pseudo-shortcuts and the need to learn a proprietary language. Bound natural-language matching instead of accumulating endless exceptions.
• Measure and reduce time to useful answers #1566 and Add reminders, follow-ups and change monitoring with quiet delivery #1575: remove unnecessary model turns and agent reasoning from deterministic fetch/filter/schedule/delivery work; do not optimise for token animation.
• Make delegated tasks finish reliably and reply where they started #1565 and Measure and reduce time to useful answers #1566: replace empty acknowledgements, vague spinners and agent monologues with useful state, concise outcomes and expandable details.
• Make document and attachment workflows dependable #1580 and Finish the shared design system and mobile assistant experience #1572: consolidate duplicate create/import/describe flows and eliminate recurring bespoke control styling.
• Make calendar and email connections dependable and understandable #1569: prioritise reliable existing calendar/email connections over adding more shallow integrations.

Existing foundation issues — reuse, do not fork

• Service OS: durable runs, composable services and protocol-native capabilities #1513 — durable runs, safe retries and service composition.
• Bind caller identity to call context, not request arguments #1443 — caller identity and account-scoped access.
• Gmail: read the mail that is already somebody's, so the brief is about their day #1481 — Gmail connection and incremental sync.
• A search that scans is a bug: put mail, recall and chat on the index #1472 — personal search indexing.
• Every channel is set up inbound-only, so the agent never introduces itself #1485 — channel identity, introduction and outbound preferences.
• Inbox is for work, /agent is for chat — and XMPP is the one chat protocol #1471 — conversation records and rendering by communication type.
• 113 settings: what can be defaulted, what can be deleted, and what is a decision #1473 — settings cleanup; this roadmap does not approve every historical removal proposal in that issue.
• Every page is string concatenation, so escaping is remembered rather than guaranteed #1484 — safe shared UI composition.
• Data integrity: one bug wiped a live store, and there are no backups #1458 — backup, restore and data integrity.
• Integrate voice and video streaming #1487 — voice/media transport foundations.
• Delivering one message costs O(whole mail store): 71ms at 5,000 messages, under the global lock #1464 and x402: serve before settling, so a stock client gets low latency #1457 — existing mail/payment latency work where measurements show it matters.
• Seven services call a model directly, and the rule against it is enforced one layer too high #1469 — avoid hidden model judgement in deterministic services.
• Delegate development tasks from Micro to GitHub and Codex #1539 — coding delegation remains a later application of reliable task completion.

Existing standalone integration proposals remain open; this roadmap does not authorize closing them or deleting their implementations.

Completion standard

A new user can connect useful personal sources, ask a normal question, get an appropriately fast answer, delegate work, recover it after disconnect, and receive the result where they asked. They can inspect/correct remembered context and control actions, schedules and data without understanding the service architecture. Each child issue owns focused regression checks and concrete user-visible acceptance criteria.

Product direction — 8 September clarification

Micro is the assistant people ask; Home provides the glanceable view; Inbox keeps track of communication and work. Services and self-hosted protocols are the underlying building blocks. Preserve the operator's updated README and its goal of greater personal control over internet use.

Prioritise everyday personal and shared outcomes: household plans, school runs, reminders, shared conversations, useful news/weather and a morning brief. Shared context must have explicit membership and permissions; a group assistant must not expose a member's private inbox or calendar by default.

The Town notes supplied in discussion are a product reference for connected tools, reachable assistants and useful routines, not independently verified competitor claims. Do not turn its enterprise integration catalogue, CRM workflows or team administration into Mu's direction. Personas are optional; one approachable Micro is enough.

Bring the requested Hey Micro foreground voice entry point (#1582) forward alongside direct commands (#1567). Reuse existing dictation, speech output and the assistant execution path. Always-on/background wake listening is a separate platform capability, not something a web page can promise.

Latest naming clarification: prefer the broader “personal assistant”; “a personal assistant you control” captures the direction. This does not change the consumer/social/group focus or the goal of self-hosted control. README wording remains the owner’s edit.