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Personas let you have different characters you can chat with in Zo. Different personas can have different styles or behaviors. You can also give them access to different tools. You can switch between personas at any time, and assign different personas to different channels — so Zo could use one persona in Discord and a different one for SMS.

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Prompt

One way to use Personas is to make your AI “roleplay” as a specific archetype or personality. Another way to use Personas is to provide context that you always want Zo to know when working on a particular task. For example:
  • A “tutor” persona might include background context on what you already know, and what you want to practice. Your prompt can encourage the AI to explain things in a particular way, or quiz you with questions in a particular format.
  • A “writer” persona might include examples of the style of writing you want to emulate, and other guidelines that help the AI write in a particular way.
The same prompting best practices apply when writing a Persona prompt.

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Permissions

You can control which tools each Persona is allowed to use. This can be useful for keeping a persona focused — e.g. a research assistant that can search the web but can’t modify your files, or a coding persona that works with files and shell but doesn’t send messages. You can configure permissions when creating or editing a persona in Settings → AI → Personas.

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Permission Presets

Most personas work well with a permission preset:
PresetWhat it can do
All accessEverything — no restrictions
WorkspaceFiles, web, media, and read access to settings/hosting/commerce — no shell, no communications
Read onlyRead files, search the web, and view settings — can’t modify anything
Chat onlyConversation only — no tools at all
You can also choose Custom to pick individual scopes. When a persona doesn’t have access to a tool, that tool is removed from the conversation entirely. Zo won’t try to use it or tell you it failed — it simply isn’t available.
When using custom scopes, you can grant access to specific categories:
ScopeDescription
files:readRead files and search the workspace
files:writeCreate and edit files (requires files:read)
shell:executeRun shell commands
web:searchSearch web, images, and maps
web:browseOpen and interact with web pages
media:generateGenerate images, video, and diagrams
media:transcribeTranscribe audio and video
comms:emailSend emails
comms:smsSend SMS
comms:telegramTelegram messages
comms:discordDiscord messages and history
comms:slackSlack messages
settings:readView personas, agents, and rules
settings:manageEdit personas, agents, and rules (requires settings:read)
hosting:readView sites and services
hosting:manageManage sites and services (requires hosting:read)
commerce:readView payments and orders
commerce:manageManage products and payments (requires commerce:read)
device:useUse connected devices
Integration scopes (e.g. integrations:gmail, integrations:linear) are also available for each connected app.Some scopes have dependencies — enabling a “write” scope automatically enables its corresponding “read” scope.