# Auto-reply & channel policy

Twico's core value proposition is **auto-reply**. The product premise: once you've taught the twin your voice, you trust it to answer on your behalf. There is no draft-and-approve middle ground.

Per channel, the policy is either:

* **Auto** — Twico answers as you.
* **Off** — Twico ignores this channel. No reads, no replies, no logging beyond confirming the message exists.

Manage them on the **Channels** page (avatar menu → Channels).

## How the twin decides whether to reply

Even when a channel is `auto`, Twico won't blindly post to every message. Before the LLM runs, an **addressing gate** checks the latest message:

* **DMs** — almost always reply (the addressee is unambiguous).
* **Multi-party channels** — only reply if you're @-mentioned, the message continues a back-and-forth you're already part of, or there's a clear question in your wheelhouse. If the message @-mentions someone else, Twico stays out of the way.
* **Stop signals** — if anyone says "stop", "we don't need your assistant", "shut up", "this bot is annoying", or anything similar, Twico mutes that channel for 24 hours. See [Muting](/twico/how-the-twin-behaves/muting.md).

When the gate says "skip", the message is marked as read in your Slack client and logged to [History](/twico/the-interface/history.md) as `skipped` with the reason.

## How the twin reasons

For messages that pass the gate, the agent uses a few sources:

* **Persona** — your voice + style, learned from your last 90 days of outgoing messages. See [Brain](/twico/teaching-it-about-you/brain.md).
* **Memory** — durable facts the twin has saved across past replies (and anything you've added manually under Brain → Knowledge).
* **Message history** — recent channel messages and observed conversations the twin has indexed.
* **Files on the message** — text, PDFs, screenshots, voice notes are all read before replying. See the rest of this section.
* **The web** — the agent can search + fetch URLs when an answer requires external context.

If after all that it's not confident, it fires the [afk circuit-breaker](/twico/how-the-twin-behaves/follow-ups.md) instead of guessing.

## Attachments

Twico reads files attached to messages, not just the caption:

* **Text / markdown / JSON / source code** — inlined directly (first \~4KB).
* **PDFs** — parsed with a pure-Rust PDF extractor.
* **Images** — described in 1–2 sentences via Claude vision.
* **Audio / video clips** — Slack's auto-transcription when available, with the type + length noted otherwise.

The extracted content becomes part of the prompt as `[file: name.pdf — extracted text…]`.


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# Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation

If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question.

Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter:

```
GET https://litao.gitbook.io/twico/how-the-twin-behaves/auto-reply.md?ask=<question>
```

The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language.
The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation.

Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.