Help starting the things that feel heavy

What makes him different from a chatbot

A general AI chat starts every conversation knowing nothing about you. Talu starts with your Meloa: what’s on the calendar, what’s been sitting on your list, who a to-do involves, and how you rated things like it before and after. Ask him about Thursday and he’s talking about your Thursday.

“I know what I need to do. I just can’t start.”

Every to-do in Meloa has a Start with Talu button, and what it leads with depends on the to-do. For most things it’s Find the first step: one move small enough that it needs no decision and no resolve, like opening the envelope or getting the form up on screen. Not a plan for the whole task. Just the part that gets you moving.

And sometimes the problem isn’t knowing the step, it’s being alone with it. Sit with me for 2 minutes is exactly that: Talu keeps you company while you begin. Some people call this body doubling. It’s there on every to-do, whatever kind it is.

“What do I even say when I call?”

For anything said out loud, like booking an appointment, cancelling, or calling back about a bill, Talu leads with What do I say? He helps you with the actual words: how to open, and what to ask for. Having the first sentence ready is often most of what was stopping you. For a text or an email it leads with Help me write it instead.

“I owe someone a reply and every day it gets harder”

A text you meant to answer that night. Now it’s been a month and any reply feels like it needs an apology the length of a letter. Tell Meloa someone is waiting to hear from you, and the reply that has waited longest comes up on your Today screen, one at a time.

Talu writes a first draft. If you share the message you’re answering, he builds it from that, from your calendar if they asked about a day, and over time from how you tend to change his drafts. You get one draft and one rewrite, and then it’s yours: send it, change it by hand, or leave it for now. No endless polishing, no tone checks, because endless polishing is how the reply ends up never sent.

Meloa can’t read your messages unless you hand one over, and it never sends anything for you.

“Everything feels urgent and I can’t pick one”

Dump in everything you’ve been avoiding, typed badly and in any order, or said out loud. Talu gives you back one thing, picked by how much relief it buys for the time it takes. That usually means the small dreaded thing, like the two-minute email you’ve carried for weeks. You never see the pile ranked, because a sorted list of fourteen things is still fourteen things.

For the things you’ve set aside for later, Plan with Talu drafts a plan from your own record: what tends to go well for you and when. There’s more on why this works on the page about task paralysis.

“My whole week is a mess in my head”

You don’t have to sort it first. Say it the way it comes out: “Mom picks me up at 5:30, hair at 6, then dinner with my brother and sister.” Talu puts each part on your calendar at its time, adds travel between them, tags the people, and holds room before and after the outing. The things with no time attached become to-dos. You see all of it before anything lands.

The same works for things other people send you. Paste in a school newsletter or an appointment confirmation, forward it to your own Meloa address, or take a photo of an invite, and the dates become events with room already around them.

“This week is too much”

On Sunday, Talu looks at the week ahead and offers up to three ways to ease it, built only from what’s really there: keep a hard date light, lighten the fullest day, add room after the thing you’re dreading, or text someone who helps. Under each one he says exactly what he would change. Events never move without you, and there’s always an undo.

During the week it’s the same idea, one to-do at a time. When something is likely to slip and it matters, he offers a smaller way in. When it’s heavy and happening anyway, he offers room after it to land. When little rides on it, letting it go is a fair choice. Every one of those is an offer. Nothing is done for you, and a heavy to-do is never hidden.

What Talu knows about you, and who else sees it

By default he learns from your ratings, what you do with plans, your notes, and the journal entries you ask him about. Two switches in Settings let him learn from more, like your sleep, the people in your life and your journal. Both are off until you turn them on, and neither reaches your medications.

Nobody else can see any of it. What Meloa learns stays in your account, every line of it can be erased, and we don’t sell data. There’s more on how Meloa keeps it safe.

On a paid plan

Every plan includes some Talu each month; how much is the main thing a paid plan buys. Paid plans also add his voice, which reads his replies aloud as they appear, and the chance to hand him something hard, not just something with dates in it: share a difficult email or message and he goes through it with you. With the Meloa Chrome extension, he can do that right inside Gmail.

Questions people ask