Pio, the assistant always next to you

Pio is a small face that floats over every app on your computer, like a colleague at the next desk. It sees which window you work in, you can talk to it and it answers out loud, it now and then says something useful by itself, and when you hand it the mouse and keyboard it does things for you. Bigger work it passes to your team, so the other agents' chats stay clean.

Pio needs the Piomio desktop app on a Mac or a Windows PC. On other devices Pio is still there as a chat.

Turn Pio on#

Pio comes turned off. After the update (on a new hub: right after the introductions) your main assistant offers it once in the chat, with buttons. While Pio is off, a Turn on Pio line waits under your main assistant in the sidebar; it asks the assistant for you. You can also ask any time: "turn on Pio". To turn it off, say "turn off Pio", or switch it off in Settings → Plugins → Pio — always next to you.

Once Pio is on, two things appear:

• Its face in a corner of your screen, above every window. Drag it wherever you like.
• Its chat: in the sidebar Pio's small face flies beside your main assistant, with what it is doing under its name. Everything you say to Pio and everything it says is there. Pio's chat is its own: what you discuss with Pio does not fill the other agents' chats.

The face and its card#

Hover over the face to open its card. On top, Open chat and ✕ to hide the face (to bring it back, click Pio next to your main assistant in the sidebar, or tell Pio "come back"). Below, two tabs: Chat, Pio's lines with a field to type to it, and Settings, with a dot when something there needs you:

• Work together: Pio sees which app and window are active (their names and titles). It checks every two seconds and keeps only the last few windows, in memory, never on disk.
• Voice: you talk to Pio and it answers out loud (see below).
• Hand over control: Pio may use the mouse and keyboard (see below).

The ring around the face shows what Pio is doing: watching, listening, hearing you, thinking, speaking, or driving (red). In the sidebar a dot on Pio's face says it is busy; its name and state show on hover.

When Pio says something while the card is closed, its line pops out next to the face for a few seconds.

What Pio sees#

With Work together on, Pio knows the active app and window title before each answer, and the windows before it. Pio can also read the active window as text through macOS's accessibility (what screen readers use): the page's address or the document's file, what you selected, the field you type in, and the text it shows, never a password field. For mail, documents, code and pages that is quicker and more exact than a picture, so Pio reads first and looks at a picture for charts and layout.

When you ask Pio to look ("Pio, look what's wrong with this chart", "what's here?"), the face sends a picture of your active window with your words, so Pio sees what you mean at once; otherwise Pio takes the picture itself when it needs one. The picture goes with that message into Pio's chat (its files, like any photo you send), nowhere else.

Now and then Pio takes a quiet look on its own: when you settled in a new window, or after you worked in one window for a while. It speaks up only when it has something truly useful to say (a mistake, a faster way, something from memory or from the team's work); otherwise it stays silent, and these looks leave nothing in its chat.

How often it may speak up on its own is up to you. Say it in Pio's chat: "talk less", "speak up whenever you have a tip". There are three levels: quiet (rarely), normal, chatty. Pio never looks on its own while you are talking with it or while it drives.

What is on your screen is outside content for Piomio: after Pio looked, the hub's guards for outside content apply to its chat (see Security).

Voice#

Turn on Voice in the card. The first time, Pio offers to download its voice once: the speech engine (sherpa-onnx, open source), a voice and a speech-to-text model. Everything runs on the hub's own computer, with no keys and no cloud. Until the download finishes, Pio speaks with your computer's own voice.

• Voices: Russian Dmitri (male, the default for Russian), Denis (male) and Irina (female); English Ryan (male, the default) and Amy (female). Ask your assistant to switch: "let Pio speak with Denis's voice".
• Speech to text: GigaAM for Russian, Parakeet for other languages, also local. If the hub has an OpenAI or Groq key for voice messages, those are used first (see Settings).

Pio does not answer everything it hears. By default it answers:

• what you say after its name, the wake phrase: "Pio, what's wrong with this chart?";
• what you say while holding ⌥Space (Alt+Space on Windows), name or not;
• your answer right after it spoke (for 20 seconds).

The rest of what the mic hears is dropped and never saved. You can change that in Pio's chat: "listen only while I hold the key", or "hear everything I say". When you start speaking, Pio stops talking.

Hand over control#

Ask Pio to do something ("Pio, open my last invoice and send it to Anna") and press Hand over control in the card. Your computer asks to confirm in its own window, which no page can fake. Then:

• a red frame goes around the screen while Pio drives;
• Pio looks, clicks, types, presses keys, scrolls and opens apps or sites, one small step at a time;
• Esc, any move of your own mouse, or 10 minutes take control back at once; so does the switch in the card.

Pio does only what you asked. It never types passwords, card numbers or codes, and it does not send, pay, delete or publish unless that is exactly what you asked for. Every step is in the hub's security log.

On a Mac: permissions#

macOS asks once for each of these, for Piomio:

When one is missing, Pio's card says so and Open Settings goes to the right place in System Settings.

Pio and the team#

Pio thinks with a fast model, so it answers at once. Anything that takes steps (research, code, a long read, the browser, work on another computer) it gives to a teammate as a task and tells you who took it. You see the task in Pio's chat and in Tasks, like any other.