Questions, answered

Ask Nell is a personal AI assistant for your correspondence. Connect your email and calendar, and Nell reads what arrives, ranks what matters, briefs you at the times you choose, drafts replies in your voice, manages tasks, and helps with scheduling — in chat or out loud by voice.

The founding rule: Nell drafts, you decide. Nothing is ever sent on your behalf without your approval. Create an account or read the getting started guide.

Day to day, Nell:

• Reads and triages your inbox — known people outrank strangers, newsletters and robots are kept out of your way
• Briefs you at the times you choose, with what actually needs you
• Drafts replies for your review, learning your writing style
• Manages your calendar — creates, moves, and checks events, spots clashes, handles meeting invites
• Keeps tasks and reminders, including ones she spots in your mail
• Remembers people — who they are, the state of your correspondence
• Follows standing instructions — plain-English rules like "file receipts and forward them to my accountant"
• Talks — full voice conversations on any page

Every capability is covered in the help centre.

No. Outbound email is always queued as a draft for your review — you approve, edit, or reject it on the Approvals page or right in the chat. This is enforced in the application's architecture, not just in the AI's instructions: the assistant has no tool that sends directly.

The one exception is deliberate: standing instructions you create yourself (for example, "forward receipts to my accountant"). Those run with the trust level you gave them, and every action they take is still recorded in your Approvals history.

Yes. Tap the microphone on any chat surface and talk — Nell transcribes you live, answers out loud, and you can interrupt her mid-sentence like a real conversation. Voice works in the browser and in the installable home-screen app.

Audio is streamed for live speech-to-text and text-to-speech and is not stored — see the Privacy Policy. Voice is included in the Pro plan; see pricing.

The briefing is Nell's answer to "what do I need to know right now?" It ranks what arrived by who it's from and what it needs from you — people you actually correspond with outrank mailing lists every time — alongside today's calendar and open tasks.

It refreshes as your accounts sync and re-frames itself through the day (morning, afternoon, evening editions at times you choose in Settings). The ranking is deterministic and grounded in your own correspondence history: the AI phrases the briefing, but it can't invent or promote items.

Yes — Nell is powered by AI, and AI can be incomplete, out of date, or wrong. That's why the product is designed so a mistake is an inconvenience, not a disaster:

• drafts wait for your review before anything is sent;
• answers are grounded in your actual mail and calendar, and Nell is instructed to say when something isn't tracked rather than guess;
• everything Nell does is visible — drafts, actions, and history.

Treat Nell like a very fast, very organised assistant: brilliant with the legwork, and you sign off on what matters.

The short version:

• Secrets are encrypted at rest — OAuth tokens and credentials are stored with Fernet symmetric encryption; nothing secret is stored in plain text.
• The AI never sees your credentials. When Nell needs to act, she asks the application layer, which holds the tokens.
• Your content lives in an isolated, per-user vault — access outside it is a hard error, enforced in code.
• Transport is TLS, sessions are manageable per device, two-factor authentication is available, and login is lockout-protected.

The Security page describes everything in detail.

You, and your assistant working on your behalf. Your synced mail lives in your own isolated vault, and excerpts are passed to AI model providers only to generate the responses you asked for.

Humans at otageLabs do not read your mail in the ordinary course of business. The exceptions are the standard, narrow ones: you explicitly ask us to look at something (support), a security investigation requires it, or the law compels it. The Privacy Policy spells this out.

No. The content of your email, calendar, and conversations is not used to train AI models — not by us, and we don't permit our inference traffic to be used for training by the model providers either.

What we do use is anonymised, aggregated statistics about how the Service is used — patterns that identify no one — to improve the product. The Privacy Policy covers this in full.

Two things, cleanly separated:

1. Your personal data runs your assistant. Mail and calendar sync into your private vault so Nell can brief you, draft for you, and act when you approve. It's shared only with the processors needed to do that (the AI model generating a response, Stripe for billing, and so on — the full list is public).
2. Anonymised, aggregated data improves the product. Usage patterns that do not and cannot identify you help us make the Service better and build new features.

We don't sell personal data, we don't use it for advertising, and we don't train AI models on your content.

Go to Settings → Security → "Delete account…" and confirm with your password. Your account goes dormant immediately; after a 30-day grace period everything is permanently purged. If you change your mind, just sign back in within the 30 days — everything picks up where you left off.

Your actual mailbox and calendar are never touched — Ask Nell only ever holds a synced working copy. Full details on the Data Retention & Deletion page.

Yes, whenever you like. Settings → Security → "Download your data" builds a ZIP containing your entire vault (mail, calendar, notes, and tasks as portable markdown), your full conversation history, your usage data, and your settings. The download link lasts 24 hours.

It's your data — leaving with it is a feature, not a negotiation. See Data Retention & Deletion.

Settings → Connections → Connect Google, then approve the consent screen. One grant covers Gmail and Google Calendar, and syncing starts straight away — your first briefing is usually ready within minutes.

Nell asks only for the permissions the features need (reading and organising mail, sending what you approve, managing events). Every scope and the reason for it is documented in the Privacy Policy. You can disconnect at any time from the same page.

Settings → Connections → Connect Microsoft and approve the consent screen — works with personal Outlook.com accounts and Microsoft 365 accounts, covering both mail and calendar. Apple/iCloud calendars connect via CalDAV with an app-specific password, and any IMAP mailbox can be connected too.

The email guide walks through all the options.

Only what the features you can see actually require:

• Mail — read and organise (mark read, archive, label): how your inbox gets triaged. This permission does not allow permanent deletion or account-settings access.
• Mail — send: how a draft you approved leaves the building.
• Calendar — read and write: sync your schedule, create and move events when you ask.
• Docs and Drive search (Google): read or create documents when you ask Nell to work with one.

Signing in with Google or Microsoft is separate and identity-only — it never grants mailbox access. The full scope-by-scope table, including what we deliberately don't request, is in the Privacy Policy.

Yes. Settings → Connections → Disconnect removes the connection and deletes its stored tokens immediately. Synced content already in your vault stays until you delete it (or your account); your provider's originals are never affected.

Belt and braces: you can also revoke Ask Nell's access from your Google account or your Microsoft account security page.

Ask Nell is a monthly subscription — one price, everything in the plan included, cancel anytime. Current plans, prices, and what's in each are always on the pricing page, which is the source of truth.

Billing is handled by Stripe; we never see your card details.

Running an AI assistant costs real compute, so each plan includes a monthly usage allowance — sized so normal daily use fits comfortably inside it, with no token-maths required from you.

If a month runs unusually heavy you'll be warned at 80%, and at the limit Nell shifts to a lighter mode rather than stopping. A top-up restores full service instantly. Your live usage is always visible in Settings → Plan & usage.

Yes, from Settings → Plan & usage, in a couple of clicks — no retention call, no dark patterns. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing cycle, and everything keeps working until then.

Your data stays yours: export a complete copy any time, and account deletion is just as straightforward.

Yes — you can try Nell before you pay. The current trial length and terms are on the pricing page. You'll need to connect at least one email account for the trial to show you anything real: Nell with your actual inbox is the whole point.

You do — unambiguously. The Terms of Use say it in one line: your data is yours. We claim no ownership of your mail, calendar, notes, or conversations, and you can export or delete all of it at any time.

What you grant us is the permission needed to operate the Service (host, process, and display your content back to you), plus the right to use anonymised and aggregated patterns — data that identifies no one — to improve the product and build new things.

Because your email address is load-bearing here. It's how we verify the account is yours, where security notices and account recovery go, and — this being a correspondence assistant — part of the product itself.

Disposable and relay addresses break all of that: verification links evaporate, lockout warnings vanish, and recovery becomes impossible. So signup requires a real, permanent address. We'll treat it with the respect the Privacy Policy promises — it's never sold and never used for advertising.

Any modern browser, on desktop or phone. Ask Nell is also an installable web app: add it to your home screen and it opens full-screen like a native app, with push notifications for reminders and briefings. Voice works in the browser and the installed app alike.

Three ways, in order of speed:

1. Ask Nell. In-app, she can answer questions about the product, your plan, security, and data handling — grounded in these very pages.
2. The help centre — guides for every part of the product.
3. Email us at hello@asknell.io — a human reads it.

Yes. Nell connects to Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 accounts the same way as personal ones, and the Terms of Use cover use on behalf of a business. One practical note: some organisations restrict which apps can access mail, so your workspace admin may need to approve the connection.

Nell runs on a curated mix of leading AI models — from providers including Anthropic and OpenAI — routed automatically per request: lightweight models handle quick lookups, stronger ones take on complex reasoning and drafting. You never pick a model or manage an API key; that's our job.

Whatever model serves a request, the same rules apply: your content is processed only to generate your response, and it is never used for training.