Creating Routines from Chat

Routines are Alloovium’s automation: recurring jobs that check things, draft things, and chase things without you driving. There’s a full visual builder for them (see Routines), but you don’t need it to get started — the assistant can build a routine from a plain-language description, the same way you’d hand the job to a person.

Like every assistant action, routine creation is draft-gated: the assistant lays out what it understood — when the routine runs, what each step does, any condition, and how the results reach you — and nothing is scheduled until you confirm it.

The whole brief fits in one message: “every Monday at 7, draft the weekly site report from last week’s diaries”, “each morning, summarise anything new in the inbox about Northgate”, “every Friday, remind the subbies whose claims are due next week”. The assistant maps the sentence onto real routine steps — the same blocks the visual builder uses — so what you get is a first-class routine, not a chat-only reminder.

If something essential is missing, the assistant asks instead of guessing — most commonly how the result should reach you: a notification, an email, or a post to your Today page.

Routines can carry a condition, and you can say it naturally: “every morning check the lookahead — if anything is flagged at risk, message the responsible sub.” The condition is evaluated on every run, in your words: when nothing is at risk, the routine stays quiet; when something is, the chase goes out. That’s the difference between automation and noise.

Not every routine runs on a clock. Routines can also fire when something happens — when a document lands in the project, when someone joins, when a claim is raised. Say the trigger the way you’d say it to a person: “when someone joins the project, send them the site induction pack”, “when a new drawing set is uploaded, summarise what changed and post it to Today.” For things the platform can’t watch directly, the assistant proposes the closest reliable shape — usually a frequent scheduled check — and tells you that’s what it’s doing.

Existing routines are manageable from the same conversation: “change the morning summary to 6:30”, “pause the claim chaser over Christmas”, “delete the Friday reminder routine”. The assistant confirms which routine it matched before changing anything, and edits are drafted for approval just like creation.

Every routine the assistant builds also appears in the Routines list, where you can open it in the visual builder — chat-created and builder-created routines are the same thing underneath.

The assistant notices patterns in what you ask it. If you’ve requested the same thing several mornings running, an Automate this chip appears under the answer — one click starts the routine draft with the schedule already inferred from when you actually ask. You review and confirm it like any other routine.