What happens to a promise you made in a chat six weeks ago?

Jude Mercer, SEO and Content, Memoe — 9 October 2026

"I'll send you the deck by Thursday" is easy to type and easy to lose. It sits a few messages up from the bottom of a thread, with nothing marking it as different from the small talk around it. Nobody files it anywhere. The only thing holding it is whoever said it, and their memory of a Tuesday afternoon.

This page is about what Memoe does with sentences like that one — the ones you make to other people, and the ones they make to you. It is sourced straight from the product's own shipped documentation (version 0.3.21), the same way our release notes page is built from the real update feed rather than a summary written after the fact.

The claim, as the person who built it put it

Moe notices what you promised (and what people promised you) and reminds you the morning it's due.

That is the whole idea. The rest of this page is the mechanics behind it: what counts as a promise, what makes one go away on its own, and when exactly a late one comes up.

What counts as a promise, and where Moe finds one

Moe looks for promises in the places it already reads for you, so there is nothing to turn on and nothing to configure:

• your chats and mail;
• your calendar;
• your Apple Notes and recorded calls, only while Notes is open;
• the notes of meetings Moe itself took;
• anything you tell it directly, such as "I told Dana I'd call her Monday."

A promise is kept in the exact words it was made in. A loose "let's catch up sometime" does not count — there is no date or commitment in it to track.

Most promises never reach you at all

When the deck actually goes out, in the same chat or by mail, Moe sees that and closes the promise itself, with no card and no interruption. The same happens if someone says it is no longer needed. Before anything is raised, Moe checks once more across everything it reads for a sign the promise was already kept. A promise only surfaces when, as far as Moe can tell, it genuinely wasn't.

When a late or upcoming promise does surface, the timing is specific

This is the part that is easiest to get wrong by hand, and the part we think is worth spelling out exactly rather than waving at:

• A promise with a date comes up at 9 in the morning on the day it's due.
• If there's still no sign it was kept, it comes up again the morning after.
• A promise with a specific time comes up two hours before it, and again an hour after.
• A promise with no date at all comes up once, a week after it was made.
• One made late on its own due day waits for the next morning, rather than surfacing that night.
• A promise that's been overdue for two weeks is let go quietly. It does not come back weeks later just because your Mac happened to be shut on the day it was due.

Noticing is not the same as acting

When Moe has something to raise, the notch shows one line for a few seconds and then settles into an amber glow. Nothing opens by itself, nothing is read out loud, and whatever you were doing stays exactly where it was. Moe does not speak the reminder; it waits for you to open it.

What you find, once you do, is whatever actually fits: a reply already drafted for Dana if your own deadline is today, a polite nudge if someone else's has passed, or just the promise stated plainly if there's nothing useful to prepare in advance. Either way, nothing is ever sent unless you say so and confirm it first — the same approval step every outgoing message goes through. A promise that came from your own notes or a meeting has no conversation to reply in, so Moe asks you where it should go rather than guessing. Not now or Not this kind of thing works on this card exactly as it does on any other, and waving a promise's card away stops Moe watching that one.

Where to find it

Open Settings › Running in the background › More › Noticed and look under Promises: open ones first, soonest due first, each showing who it's with, where it was made, and the exact words. Kept, called-off and let-go promises stay listed, dimmed, for a month. On an Away plan, your cloud computer keeps noticing promises while your Mac is shut, but only your Mac ever brings one up. What either side notices, or has already told you, reaches the other within about five minutes, no chat required.

What's on this page is everything the shipped product does today, nothing more. For the complete section it's drawn from, including how Moe decides when to speak up about anything else it notices, see Running in the background › Promises in the docs. Memoe is beta, built by one person — if this behaves differently for you than described here, that's worth telling us.