Purpose
Coot is an AI application for individuals and businesses, with the goal of applying AI to your or your business's own documents, calendars, and email, while keeping privacy, staying local, and running on your own hardware. It is officially described as "a free app" that puts AI to work on your materials, with "data stays with you, is not used to train AI, and there are no per-use bills," while cloud models are optional.
Main Capabilities
Personal and Everyday Use
- Writing and thinking: draft, rewrite, and brainstorm, with the official emphasis on "private."
- Ask your documents questions: get answers from your own PDFs and notes.
- Centralized view: email, Slack, and spreadsheets flow into one shareable view.
- Handle your inbox: summarize, categorize, and draft replies.
- Track bills and receipts: collect receipts and view monthly summaries.
- Automate routine work: set up a task once and have it run on a schedule.
- It also includes everyday features such as chat, writing assistance, voice, and images.
Business and Team Scenarios
Uses are officially listed by function:
- Finance and accounting: invoices and receipts become organized accounts; collect invoices and receipts, categorize them by rules, and generate monthly reports.
- Human resources: summarize job resumes, answer policy questions, draft onboarding documents, and keep employee data internal.
- Sales: track follow-ups from email and spreadsheets in one view, while also seeing the sales pipeline and team chat, and share the view with management.
- Marketing: use one view to see campaign status, pending tasks, and owners, and share it with the whole team.
- Operations: view "in progress, pending, completed" status across sources; generate dashboards from spreadsheets; one shared team view; generate reports on a schedule.
- Customer service: answer faster based on your own knowledge base, draft replies for review, and summarize long conversations.
- Legal and compliance: review contracts without sharing documents, flag unusual clauses, and search policies.
- IT and developers: ask questions about internal documents, code, and logs; summarize logs and tickets; run heavy tasks on a shared machine.
- Management: directly view project and sales status, one version that everyone sees, without waiting for weekly reports.
Agents and Skills
Officially described as "an AI assistant that completes multi-step work for you," able to "automate routine work on a schedule," and able to "remember context, so it improves over time."
System and Model Selection
- Run on your own computer: private, can work offline, no per-use fees.
- Use a cloud provider: optional, and only those requests leave your control.
- Shared computing: use the stronger machine you are already connected to(your own or your team's) to handle heavy tasks without buying new hardware.
- Model Hub: Find models that fit your hardware.
How to use it
The official getting-started path is "install and go, everything stays on your machine." You can start on your own computer; if you can install an app on your computer, you can run it. After that, Coot can be hosted on a server you own, in your own cloud, or on a managed private Coot cloud, and managed through a control panel. Workspaces can be connected to share files, models, and compute, and office locations can connect through a private network (VPN). At the installation level, the official page provides downloads (currently available for macOS).
Connections and authorization: Coot can connect to supported tools such as Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Slack, Outlook, Zoho, and others, so they can be used in workflows and automations. The official documentation states that connections are optional and authorized by you; Coot accesses data from connected services only when the operations and workflows you request or configure require it. Signing in with Google is used only for identity verification and does not automatically give Coot access to your Google Workspace data.
Sharing and collaboration
- Teams can use a shared, permissioned space: shared folders, roles, and sign-in are all handled by the system.
- One person can run a model and share it with teammates, even across office locations via VPN.
- Dashboards built from connected tools can be shared with specified people, and everyone sees the same shared view rather than their own stale copies of reports; you control viewing permissions.
Use cases
Individuals: drafting and brainstorming, asking questions about documents, centralized viewing, handling the inbox, tracking bills, automating routine tasks. Businesses: finance, human resources, sales, marketing, operations, customer service, legal, IT, and management can all run on their own data, which the official documentation says can reach multi-terabyte scale. It is also suitable for scenarios where "data cannot go to the cloud," and can scale to teams and enterprises.
Limitations and notes
- Platform availability: the official documentation says a macOS version is currently available, with Windows and other platforms in development; Microsoft Windows and shared team workflows are marked as "coming soon" and point to the Roadmap.
- Cloud models are optional; if you add a cloud model, only the corresponding requests are sent to that provider.
- Pricing: the official documentation says the Coot app can be downloaded and used for free, and the local app is always free; pricing information for more advanced deployments is not yet available.
- Specific installation commands, code examples, and minimum hardware requirements are not yet available.
- The specific implementation details and accuracy of each capability are not yet available.
