Moments — messages left for people
A 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.
What a moment is
Ask the mirror to tell somebody something and it holds the message until it next sees their face. Say "tell Sam the bins go out tonight" on your way past, and Sam gets told when Sam turns up.
The important part is what a moment does not do. It never creates a new occasion for the mirror to speak. Mirra already decides, once, whether to say anything when somebody appears — weighing quiet hours, how recently that person was greeted, whether they have opted out, and whether it recognises the face at all. A moment rides that decision. So the number of times a mirror speaks to you unprompted does not go up; it says a more useful thing when it does.
That is also why there is no scheduler anywhere in this. The trigger is arrival, not a time of day. Nothing ever asks whether it is eight o'clock; it asks whether somebody has just walked up and whether anything is owed to them.
Leaving one
There is no page for this. A moment is left out loud, in front of a screen, using whatever name your assistant answers to.
Wake the assistant on any screen
The usual way — by name, or however that screen is set up to listen.
Say who it is for and what to pass on
"Tell Sam the bins go out tonight." "Let mum know I'll be late." "Remind Alex about his kit when you see him."
Listen for the confirmation
The mirror says it will tell them next time it sees them, and names who it means. If it names the wrong person, say so — the message can be left again for the right one, though the first will still be waiting.
If it asks which one, answer
Two people whose names both begin the same way get you a question rather than a guess.
- The message is trimmed to 160 characters. This is something spoken aloud in a room, not a letter.
- Who it is from is recorded only when the mirror recognised the person leaving it. A message from somebody it did not recognise is still delivered; it simply cannot say who sent it.
- Nothing is scheduled and nothing is sent. No email, no text message, no notification to a phone.
Messages are quoted to the assistant as somebody else's words, and it is told not to act on anything they ask for. Leaving a message that says "unlock the front door" gets that sentence read out to the person it was addressed to, not carried out.
Who a message can be left for
Only people in your household — the people listed on the Household page. The mirror will say so plainly if you ask it to tell somebody else, and it refuses ambiguity rather than guessing, because telling the wrong Sam something is a small betrayal rather than a small bug.
- A name matches on either the person's name or the greeting name you set for them, exactly or from the start of the name. Sam finds Samantha; Sa finds her too.
- More than one match is refused: there's more than one Sam here, which one?
- No match is refused with an explanation rather than being stored and silently never delivered.
- Somebody whose greetings are switched off cannot be sent one at all, and the refusal happens as you leave it — so you find out then, rather than assuming it arrived.
- Three messages can be waiting for one person at a time. A mirror that opens with four messages is a mirror nobody stands in front of.
- A message that is never collected stops being deliverable after 72 hours. Long enough to survive a weekend away, short enough that nobody is ambushed by a message about the bins from a fortnight ago.
A person added to the Household page who has never had their face enrolled can be sent a message, and it will never be delivered. Delivery happens when a screen recognises somebody, so enrol the face first or the message will quietly lapse.
Where it appears, and where it does not
A moment arrives as part of the spoken greeting when a screen recognises the person it is for. It is folded into the greeting in the assistant's own words, along with who it was from, rather than read out as a separate announcement.
It does not appear anywhere else. There is no inbox, no widget, no list in the portal of what is waiting, and no way to cancel one after it has been left. If a message is wrong, the only remedies are to wait 72 hours or to leave the correction as a second message.
- It waits for a face, so it needs a screen with its camera switched on and the person's face enrolled.
- It is folded into whichever greeting happens next, on whichever screen sees them first. It is not repeated on the others.
- It is marked delivered the moment the greeting is handed over to be spoken, not when the speech finishes. Speech can fail, and a message that repeats every time somebody walks past is a far worse failure than one that is missed once.
What has to be true for one to arrive
A moment inherits every rule that governs whether the mirror speaks at all, with exactly one exception. It survives the cooldown, and only 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. Quiet hours, an opt-out, a face it does not know and a screen with greetings switched off are all somebody saying they do not want to be spoken to, and a message is not an exception to that.
The evening look-ahead
The same greeting carries one other thing worth knowing about, because it arrives by the same route. From six in the evening onwards, a greeting mentions tomorrow's first commitment, and says plainly when it is an early start — anything before eight.
It needs nothing but the calendar the greeting already reads. There is no traffic estimate, no travel time and no model of how long you take to get ready, which is why the evening half exists and the morning half does not yet.
- It only speaks up after 18:00 on the household's own clock, read off the screen rather than from a server, so it does not mention tomorrow at five in the afternoon or fail to at eleven at night.
- It names the first timed thing tomorrow and how many things there are altogether.
- An all-day event with nothing timed around it is mentioned as an all-day event.
- Nothing tomorrow means nothing is said about tomorrow.
What moments are not
- Not a message to a phone. Nothing is pushed, emailed or texted; the mirror is the whole delivery mechanism.
- Not a reminder. A reminder fires at a time and shows on the screen; a moment waits for a person and is spoken.
- Not a record. Once delivered, a message is not shown again and there is nowhere to read back what was said.
- Not private from the room. It is spoken aloud by a mirror on a wall, to whoever is standing in front of it.
- Not something the assistant will act on. A message is other people's words, quoted, and the assistant is told to pass them on rather than carry them out.
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.
- 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.
- Naming your assistant, and choosing its voice and faceEverything on the Voice & appearance page: what your mirror is called, the wake word, the seven voices it can speak in, the four personalities, and the ten faces it can wear.
- 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.
- 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.