Everything up to now, Aura knows because you said it. Connectors are where it starts seeing for itself.
Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Slack, GitHub. Each one turns a category of “tell me about your week” into “I can see your week”, and the difference in what comes back is not subtle.
What each one actually buys you
Calendar is the one I’d connect first for most people. It converts vague time into real time: what’s actually on Thursday, what you’ve double-booked, what needs preparing before it arrives rather than during. Almost every useful proactive thing has a date in it somewhere.
Mail is the highest-value and the most personal, which is why it’s second rather than first. It’s what lets Aura notice the reply you’re waiting on, the deadline buried in a thread, the thing you said you’d send and didn’t. If you only ever connect two, make it these.
Drive turns documents into something searchable by meaning — files import into your Library and become part of what research and reports can draw on, rather than sitting in a folder you’ll never open again.
Slack and GitHub are the work ones: what’s moving, what’s stuck, what’s waiting on you. Worth it if your job lives there, skippable if it doesn’t.
Add them one at a time
The instinct is to connect everything on day one and see what happens. Don’t — for two reasons.
First, you learn nothing from a wall of new behaviour. Connect one, live with it for a few days, notice what changed. That’s how you develop an actual sense of what it does with access, which is the thing you’re really deciding about.
Second, and more importantly: this is real access to real accounts. Granting it deliberately, one at a time, when you can see the specific thing you get for it, is simply the correct posture toward any product asking for your mail. Including mine.
What you keep
Scopes are what you granted, and revocable. Connect for a month, disconnect when you want, and it stops.
Nothing leaves without you. This is the part that matters most once Aura can see things. Reading and acting are different permissions: a draft gets written and waits for you at the approval edge. Aura writes, you approve, it sends — and your never-dos (part two) sit above all of it as rules rather than preferences.
It tells you what’s broken. When a connection expires or a scope is missing, you get told which link is broken rather than silently degraded results — an assistant quietly failing at something you think is handled is worse than one that isn’t connected at all.
What changes once they’re on
The honest description: Aura stops asking and starts arriving.
It sets its own check-in rhythm for a connected account rather than waiting to be asked. It notices the thing you’re expecting and stops watching once it lands. Your morning brief becomes about your actual day instead of a general one. And when you mention something in conversation, it can act on it against what’s really in your calendar rather than against what you remembered.
That’s the payoff for the access, and it’s the fairest way I can describe the trade: you give it senses, and in exchange it stops making you the integration layer between your own accounts.
The one I’d hold back on
There’s no rule here, only a suggestion: if you’re unsure, connect calendar first and mail second, and give yourself a week between them. Calendar is lower-stakes, immediately useful, and it teaches you the pattern. By the time you connect mail you’ll have a real sense of whether you want this thing in your inbox.
If the answer is no, that’s a legitimate answer, and the product is still useful without it.
Next: plans and approvals — what happens once Aura can act.