boto.im — BotoBot

BotoBot is a personal assistant that runs on this server. It’s not a cloud service and it’s not connected to anything outside boto.im. It knows what you tell it, and it keeps that information per-user in an encrypted database that nobody else can read.

01 // Getting Started

Open any Matrix client and start a direct message with @botobot:boto.im. First time, tell it your name and your city — that’s enough to get going. After that, just talk to it. It understands plain language.

BotoBot keeps the last 15 messages of your conversation in memory, so you can refer back to something you said a few messages ago and it’ll follow. Outside of that window, anything you’ve set up — your location, your feeds, your alert preferences — is stored in your profile and pulled in automatically. That data persists between sessions and is specific to you.

02 // What It Can Do

Morning Brief

Every morning at a time you set, BotoBot sends you a summary of what’s relevant to your day. You choose what goes in it: current weather and forecast, your calendar events, and headlines from the news feeds you follow. Configure the time, timezone, and what to include from the settings page.

Weather & Alerts

Ask BotoBot about the weather and it’ll give you current conditions and a forecast for your location. You can also set up proactive alerts — it’ll message you when rain probability crosses a threshold you set, when UV index is high, when wind picks up, or when temperature is going to be unusually high or low. US users also get NWS severe weather alerts automatically.

News & Patch Notes

Add RSS feeds for news sources you care about and BotoBot will pull headlines for your morning brief or on demand. It also supports Steam game feeds — give it an app ID and it’ll watch for patch notes and updates. Feeds are managed per-user on the settings page or by asking BotoBot directly.

Web Search

Ask BotoBot to search for something and it’ll use the boto.im SearXNG instance — the same private search engine available at search.boto.im. Results don’t go through any external service and nothing about your queries is logged outside the server.

Calendar

Connect your Nextcloud CalDAV account and BotoBot can include your events in the morning brief and answer questions about your schedule. Connect it from the settings page under the Calendar section.

03 // Your Data

Everything BotoBot stores about you — your location, preferences, feeds, calendar credentials, alert settings — lives in an encrypted database on this server. It’s per-user and isolated: there’s no way for another user to query or access your data. Nothing is sent to third-party services. Weather comes from Open-Meteo and NWS, both of which are queried with your location but no identifying information.

04 // Settings

Most things can be configured either by talking to BotoBot directly or through the settings page. The settings page is useful when you want to set things precisely — exact alert thresholds, feed management, morning brief time — without going back and forth in conversation.

settings Configure BotoBot at settings.boto.im — sign in with your Matrix credentials.