Your agent does the talking. Your phone keeps the say.
Symbolon is an app on your phone that holds your keys and your rules. Your AI chief of staff works for you in the cloud, and asks the app before it acts on anything another agent wants.
Three parties, one set of rules
- Symbolon holds your keys, your rules for each connection, and the record of every decision.
- They're encrypted on your phone, behind your face, fingerprint or passcode.
- It answers one question, again and again: may this agent do this?
- An AI agent that acts for you: it books, answers, files and follows up.
- It keeps a separate private key for each connection you make.
- It asks your phone before acting on a request, and does only what the answer allows.
- A clinic's scheduler, a shop, the lab, a friend's agent.
- They reach you only through a connection you made: a QR code, a link or an introduction.
- Organizations are listed in the Symbolon Registry, which says who runs each agent and whether it's in good standing.
What happens when another agent asks
Every request your chief of staff receives goes through the same steps, whether it comes from a clinic, a shop or a friend's agent.
Riverside Clinic's agent asks
It can only reach you over the private connection you made at the front desk, and the Symbolon Registry vouches that it really is Riverside Clinic's.
Your phone checks your rules
Your chief of staff asks Symbolon on your phone: may Riverside Clinic do this? A plain rule check answers, before any AI reads the request.
Your rule says it happens automatically. It's handled and listed in Activity.
Your rule says to ask first. You approve or decline on your phone.
Your rule says never, or no rule covers it. That's listed too.
Rules in words, not settings
Each connection starts from a template, like Healthcare provider, Friend or Shop. Change any line; every line has one of four answers. Try it on the card.
- AutomaticallyIt's handled and listed in Activity.
- Automatically, and tells youIt's handled, and you get a notification.
- Asks you firstIt waits on your phone for Approve or Decline.
- NeverIt's turned down, every time.
What keeps it trustworthy
Your phone keeps the keys
Your keys, your rules and the record of every decision stay on your phone, encrypted and opened only by you. Your agent works in the cloud; the say stays in your pocket.
Rules decide before any AI reads
Whether a request is allowed is settled by a plain check against your rules, not by an AI weighing what a message says. A message can't talk your agent into anything.
One private address per connection
Your clinic, your bank and each friend get their own address for you, unlinked to the others. If one leaks, it reaches no one else, and ending the connection closes it for good.
Businesses are who they say
Organizations register their agents with the Symbolon Registry and prove they own their domain, so "Riverside Clinic" is Riverside Clinic.
When your phone is out of reach
A dead battery or a tunnel shouldn't stop routine work, and it shouldn't let anything new through either. So acting without your phone is a setting you turn on, for a time you choose: 1 hour, 8 hours, 24 hours or 3 days after your agent last heard from your phone.
While it's on, your chief of staff may do what you've set to happen automatically. Anything set to ask you first still waits. When your phone is back, every decision it took alone is listed as decided while your phone was unreachable.
When a friend asks what you know
Friends connect through an introduction, and you compare a six-digit code so you know it's really them. People are never listed in the Registry; there's no directory of you to search.
A friend's agent can then ask yours a question on a topic, like travel or restaurants. By default the question waits for you, with a draft written from your notes on that topic. For topics you choose, your agent can answer on its own.
Either way it reads only the notes you've opened for that topic and cites the ones it used, and every answer is kept under What you've shared. When there's no answer, your friend is told only that no answer is available.
If you lose your phone
Symbolon keeps an encrypted backup of everything in the app, in a file you hold, locked by a 12-word recovery phrase. With the file and the phrase you can restore on a new phone, iPhone or Android. We don't keep a copy: a store of everyone's backups would be a directory of people.
Anything in the backup that may have changed since it was written comes back set to ask you first, until you've looked at it and kept it.
See it on Main Street
Walk through a day with a chief of staff that handles the routine and asks about the rest.