Most people meet Brief through the daily email, settle into reading it, and stop there. That is a reasonable place to stop. It is also the smallest part of what is running on your behalf, and the surfaces that carry the most weight are one click away rather than on the page you are already reading.
This article is the map. Nothing here needs to be turned on.
If you would rather see it than read it, this is the same tour in under a minute.
The two surfaces that come to you
The daily briefing email. A summary of what matters across your day, in your inbox at the time you set. You can change the time, the days of the week, and which types of item appear. See Tuning your daily brief.
The meeting briefing on your calendar. Brief adds a companion event next to each meeting, carrying the briefing for that meeting. If you have ever opened a calendar invite and could not remember why the meeting exists, this is the surface that answers it, without you going anywhere.
Ask Brief, on any card
Cards throughout the web app carry a small gradient B in the corner or in the header row: meetings and calendar days, people, tasks, decisions, email threads, and messages. That button is called Ask Brief, and it opens the chat with the context of that card already loaded.
It matters because it removes the part of chat that costs you something. You do not have to describe the meeting, name the person, or explain the thread. Press the B on the card in front of you and ask the next question. See Video: Ask Brief.
The chat
Brief has a full chat, docked as a rail beside whatever page you are on.
- ⌘⌥B (Ctrl+Alt+B) shows and hides it.
- ⌘⌥P (Ctrl+Alt+P) pops the chat into its own window, and again to redock it.
- ⌘⌥⇧ with an arrow key moves the rail to a side or to the bottom.
- ⌘⇧O starts a new conversation inside the chat.
Chat is where you ask about your own work rather than searching for it. For what to ask, see Skills and example prompts, and Video: More Ask Brief examples for a longer look at it working a real meeting.
The navigation
The app is organized on the same spine as the daily brief: what you need to know, what you need to decide, what Brief can do.
| Group | Where it goes |
| Search | Everything you have connected, in one search field. ⌘K jumps straight here. |
| Today | Your day assembled: meetings, what needs you, what changed. |
| Next | The week ahead, before it arrives: one card per day, and a row of days to narrow it to just one. Picking a day here also carries that day across the app, so Meetings and People then open on it rather than on today. |
| Know | Meetings, People, and Tasks. Every meeting with its briefing, every contact with the relationship history behind them, and your task list synced with wherever your tasks already live. See Video: Syncing tasks. |
| Decide | Decisions holds the decisions in your work, both the ones that were made and the ones still being worked out. Commitments is what you owe and are owed, split into "Needs you now" and "Waiting on others", which is the closest thing to an outstanding-requests list in the product. Questions is what still needs an answer, including questions you asked in your own email and never got a reply to. Topics groups related work into subjects Brief recognized across your sources. Goals appears here marked "Coming soon" and is not live yet. Decisions and Questions keep records rather than lists of work, so they are the two worth reading about first: see Decisions and questions. |
| Do | Actions and Agents. Actions is the approval queue, and it carries a badge when something is waiting on you. Agents are standing jobs you set up once, such as a Friday review of what closed and what slipped. See Video: Building agents. |
Settings sits under your avatar, or at ⌘,, in six sections:
- Account — who you are, light or dark, signing out, deleting the account.
- Briefing & Actions — delivery, filters, approvals, your voice print, and where tasks land.
- Connections — the accounts Brief syncs from and acts in.
- Privacy & Security — what Brief reads, what it ignores, and your sessions.
- Plan — your subscription and your invites.
- Developer — the chat reasoning view and personal access tokens.
It works on your phone
The web app is built to work in a phone browser at app.trybrief.ai. No separate download. You can add it to your home screen from your browser's share or install menu, and it opens without browser chrome after that.
It also runs in WhatsApp
Brief runs in WhatsApp as a full chat surface. Link your phone once under Settings → Connections, in the Messaging group, and your briefings arrive there and you can ask Brief anything from a phone without opening a browser. See Connecting Brief to WhatsApp.
And inside the assistant you already use
If most of your day happens in ChatGPT or Claude, Brief connects to them directly as an MCP server, so your assistant can pull your briefing, your commitments, and your contacts mid-conversation. See Connecting to the MCP server, or watch it set up and used in Video: Connect AI assistants with MCP.
Keyboard shortcuts
| Shortcut | What it does |
| ⌘K / Ctrl+K | Go to Search |
| ⌘, / Ctrl+, | Go to Settings |
| ⌘B / Ctrl+B | Collapse the side navigation, or hide the Recent rail, depending on your nav layout |
| ⌘⌥B / Ctrl+Alt+B | Show or hide the chat |
| ⌘⌥P / Ctrl+Alt+P | Pop the chat into its own window, or redock it |
| ⌘⇧O / Ctrl+Shift+O | Start a new chat conversation |
If you have been reading the daily email and nothing else, the two highest-value places to go next are the Commitments page, to see what is actually waiting on you, and the Ask Brief button on your next meeting.