Acting on the phone

TALOS reaches the phone in four ways, from the narrowest to the widest. Each one is a tool, and every tool passes the powers you set — whatever Android itself would allow.

1. Device tools

Typed tools for one thing each: the torch, the volume, an alarm, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Do Not Disturb, the wallpaper, opening an app or a settings screen, reading the calendar or your location. Many of them need no Android permission — Android lets any app do them — so the only thing between a request and the action is your gate.

Each one is written to do what it says and no more:

• A screenshot is taken by the system and saved to your gallery, as the hardware buttons would: the image never reaches TALOS.
• A call, a message or a share is prepared and handed to you: TALOS never calls or sends by itself — you press the button.
• Your location is read at the moment it is needed, never in the background.
• Notifications can be read and answered once you open that access by hand. Android hides passcodes and two-factor codes from them: TALOS cannot see those, and never will. A reply is a real message, so it always asks.
• Speaking out loud counts as leaving the phone: anyone in the room hears it.

The full list is in the This phone group of the tools reference.

2. Actions in other apps

Instead of hunting on a screen, TALOS can open the right app with everything already filled in — a message, a navigation, a song, a calendar event — or attach a file from your Library in the app you name. It tells you which apps on this phone can receive it, and you press send. See In other apps.

3. Driving an app’s screen

With Screen reading — Android Accessibility, switched on in the system settings — TALOS reads what is on the screen and can tap, type and scroll inside another app to reach a goal. It says out loud what it is about to do before each move, and stops on its own after 20 steps, after 2 minutes, after two failures in a row — and the instant you touch the screen.

4. The bridge

Some things Android does not let apps do at all: listing everything installed, changing system settings, reaching parts of the phone no app can. The bridge does them with the same powers as a computer plugged in over USB — no root, and no third-party app.

• It works only after you pair it once, with a six-digit code you read on your own screen, through Android’s wireless debugging.
• Wireless debugging switches off at every restart of the phone. The pairing stays: you reconnect, without a new code.
• Every command still passes your permission gate.
• Code runs its terminal through it: with the bridge down, no command runs there.

See Connect TALOS to the phone.

One tool deserves its warning: turning airplane mode on takes the phone off the network, and with it the bridge — TALOS will not be able to turn it back off by itself.

Checked, not assumed

Phones differ: a feature this phone does not offer is reported as unsupported, an access you refused as denied, and neither as a failure. Where the effect of an action can be observed, TALOS looks before calling it done — see “Done” is a state it checks.