What the assistant will and will not do
The limits built into Mirra's assistant: locks off by default, quiet hours, the greeting cooldown, and the requests it refuses outright.
Three gates, not one
Mirra's assistant is a voice in a shared room. Anybody standing in front of a screen can talk to it, and not everything it reads came from a person in that room — a calendar event title, for one, is handed to it when it composes a greeting, and since screens gained their own invite addresses, anybody who can send an email can choose what that title says.
So the limits are not advice given to the model. They are decisions taken before the model is reached for, and taken again after it has said what it wants to do.
The plan check comes first, before anything is spent. Then only the tools your household has switched on are put in front of the model — search, remembering and music are absent rather than present-and-refused, because a tool the model cannot see is a tool it cannot spend a turn arguing with. Then, when it asks for something, the portal decides: locks are settled there and nowhere else, the search switch is tested again, and a search's cost is measured against the month's allowance before the call goes out — so a screen running an older build cannot talk its way past them.
Locks
The assistant will not operate a lock. The setting behind that is off for every household, and there is no switch for it in the portal — so on an ordinary installation, asking a mirror to unlock the front door gets “I'm not allowed to operate locks. You can turn that on under Assistant settings.” The control that message points at has not shipped yet. Take the refusal at face value: by voice, locks are unavailable.
The reason it is off rather than on is not general caution. Everything else the assistant controls is an inconvenience when it gets one wrong — a light in the wrong colour, a scene nobody wanted. A front door is not. And the assistant's input is not confined to what your household says out loud, which is what makes a lock different in kind rather than only in degree.
Locks can still be read. Asking what the back door is doing works and always has; it is changing one that is refused.
Everything else your Home Assistant exposes — lights, switches, covers, heating, scenes, media players — can be operated by voice as soon as it is connected. Mirra keeps no per-device permission list, so the connection itself is the control. Locks are the one carve-out.
Speaking without being asked
An unprompted greeting is the only time a Mirra opens its mouth on its own, and several conditions have to agree before it does: the camera is on, the screen is allowed to greet, the face is one it recognises, that person has not opted out, it is outside quiet hours, and the cooldown has passed. Most of those live on the screen's own Presence panel, because a mirror in a hallway and a mirror in a bedroom are not the same object; the personal opt-out lives on the Household page instead.
Start with the camera. It is off until you switch it on, and with it off nothing here happens at all: recognition is what tells the mirror somebody is there, and it runs on the screen itself — frames never leave it.
There is a per-person opt-out as well, on the Household page: the button beside each person reads “Auto-greet on” or “Auto-greet off”. Somebody who has turned it off is never greeted on any screen, whatever that screen's settings say.
Quiet hours
Quiet hours run from “Quiet from” to “Quiet until” on each screen, and they are read against the household's own clock rather than the server's. Mirra stores no timezone: the screen reports the time it thinks it is, and the relay works out the offset — rounded to the nearest fifteen minutes and refreshed hourly. A stale offset is wrong for at most an hour across a clock change, which happens at one in the morning, inside quiet hours, when nothing is allowed to speak anyway.
Be clear about what quiet hours are for. They stop the mirror speaking first. They do not stop it answering: stand in front of a screen at two in the morning, press the mic and ask it something, and it will reply. If you want a screen that never starts a conversation at all, “Greet people automatically” or the camera switch are the controls, not this one.
Changing the cooldown
Ninety minutes is the default gap between unprompted greetings for the same person on the same screen. It is the setting most households end up adjusting: a hallway screen that greets everyone on every pass gets tiring quickly, and a kitchen screen that says nothing all morning feels broken.
Open Screens and choose the screen
Each screen has its own presence settings; changing one does not change the others.
Find the Presence panel
It sits in the right-hand column of the screen's page, below the theme.
Set “Cooldown (min)”
Anything from 0 to 1440. 0 greets every time somebody is recognised; 1440 is once a day.
Check it saved
There is no Save button — “Saved ✓” appears at the top of the panel.
The cooldown counts from the last greeting that actually happened on that screen for that person, not from the last time they were seen.
The one thing that survives the cooldown
If somebody has left a message for you — “tell Sam the bins go out tonight” — that message is passed on the next time the mirror sees you, even inside the cooldown. “We said hello forty minutes ago” is not a reason to sit on something a person asked to have passed on, or on a six o'clock flight.
That is the only exception, and it is deliberately narrow. Quiet hours, a personal opt-out, a face the mirror does not know, and a screen with automatic greetings turned off are all somebody saying they do not want to be spoken to. A waiting message is not an exception to that, and it will sit until it can be delivered properly or lapse after 72 hours.
What it will refuse
- Operating a lock — “I'm not allowed to operate locks. You can turn that on under Assistant settings.”
- Searching the web, in a household that has not switched it on — “I can't search the web. You can switch that on under Assistant settings.”
- Anything that changes something, once it has read a web page earlier in the same conversation. Lights, scenes, tasks, reminders, timers, music, messages and memory all go together.
- Remembering or forgetting anything when remembering is off on the Household page. The two tools are not put in front of it at all, so it answers without them rather than promising and failing.
- Leaving a message for somebody it does not recognise — “I don't know anybody called Sam — I can only leave messages for people the mirror recognises.”
- Guessing between two people with the same name — “There's more than one Sam here. Which one?” Telling the wrong person something is a small betrayal, not a small bug.
- Passing a message to somebody who has turned Auto-greet off. The refusal happens when the message is left, so whoever left it finds out then instead of assuming it arrived.
- Taking a fourth message for the same person while three are still waiting. Each lapses after 72 hours if nobody collects it.
- Anything at all when the account is suspended, when the plan carries no assistant credits — “The assistant isn't included on your plan.” — or when the month's allowance is spent: “You've used this month's assistant allowance.”
- Going beyond forty lights on one command. “Turn everything off” in a large house should work, so the command is not refused — the list of lights it touches is simply capped at forty, because a runaway loop should not take the relay with it.
What it does not do on its own
- It does not use your name unless it knows who is there. When nobody is in view, the face is unfamiliar, or there is more than one, it is told plainly not to guess — and anything it is asked to remember in that state is filed against the household rather than a person.
- It does not recite what it remembers. Memory is there to answer well with, not to read back: a mirror that opens with “you cycle to work on Tuesdays” is unsettling rather than clever.
- It is told to store only what somebody asked it to remember, never something it worked out about you. That one is an instruction rather than a gate, which is exactly why every stored fact appears in the words that produced it on the Household page, with a Forget button beside it.
- No pictures leave the house. Recognition runs on the screen and frames never travel. When you ask what is on the screen, the answer is assembled from your own layout and the device's report of what it is painting — there is no screenshot anywhere in it.
- There is no private tier. Every remembered fact is readable by every full-access member of the household, so nothing should be stored that could not be said aloud in front of everyone who lives there.
Reading back what was said
The surest check on any of this is the transcript.
Open Assistant in the portal
It opens on the settings page.
Click Conversations
Top right, beside the saving indicator.
Expand a conversation
Each row shows which screen, when it started and how many messages. Opening it shows every line, on both sides.
The page lists the thirty most recent conversations. A conversation ends after ninety seconds of quiet, so an evening of occasional questions appears as several entries rather than one long one. What the list holds is what was said aloud — not which tools ran, and not the text of anything that was looked up.
Related
- The assistant: how a conversation worksHow you summon Mirra, what happens between hearing you and answering you, which tools it can reach, where the transcript goes, and what a conversation costs against your monthly allowance.
- Letting the assistant look things upHow to switch web search on for your assistant, what a search costs, and why a conversation that reads the web can no longer change anything in your home.
- What Mirra remembers, and how to see or delete itMirra stores only the facts somebody asked it out loud to remember, shows every one of them in the words that produced them, and can be told to stop remembering altogether.
- People and presenceHow to add a household member, enrol their face on a screen, and understand what Mirra stores about them and where recognition actually happens.
- GreetingsHow Mirra greets people — the greeting widget on the glass, the spoken greeting when a screen recognises somebody, and the rules, quiet hours and cooldown that decide what is said and when.
- Moments — messages left for peopleA moment is a short message left with the mirror for somebody in your household, passed on out loud the next time that person is recognised.
- Home AssistantHow Mirra reaches Home Assistant through a screen on your own network, what it syncs, what it notices, and what each failure message means.
- Screen settingsEvery setting on a screen's own page that belongs to the screen rather than to a scene — its shape, which way up it is, its camera and gestures, the commands you can send it, and unpairing.
- Your dataSet how long Mirra keeps assistant transcripts, presence and the activity log, take a copy of everything held about your household, and close the account for good.