Capabilities

A pal isn't only good company — it's a competent adult that can help with the practical parts of life. The things a pal can do are its capabilities, and pal.fun ships a small, deliberately-curated set rather than an endless plugin store.

What a pal can do today

• Calendar — your pal keeps a real calendar with you: birthdays, appointments, the life-admin a good friend remembers. You describe an event in words and the pal files it; it can remind you proactively. Crucially, when it edits an event it does so by describing the event and letting the system resolve which one you mean — the pal never juggles opaque database ids, and if there's ambiguity it asks.
• Library — the place your pal's output accumulates. A normal chatbot strands everything it makes you in a scrolling transcript; a friend gives what you made together an address you own and can find again months later. The Library is one roof over those collections.

These surface in the glass box too — each capability shows, read-only, exactly what it can touch. The permission manifest is part of the transparency promise.

A capability is not a plugin

Worth a note for builders: capabilities aren't a third-party marketplace. They're a small, unified set built into the platform, each one a clear contract (a name, the tools it adds, a short playbook telling the pal how to use it well). pal.fun deliberately does not try to be an integration layer that syncs with everything — it's a destination, not a bridge. You come here for the calendar a friend keeps for you; the pal's own proactive reminders are the notification layer, not a sync to some other product.

There's also a principle behind which capabilities exist at all: each one has to earn its round-trip. Routing a request through a frontier model costs real money, so a capability is only worth building if it buys genuine judgment with that turn — brainstorming a plan, adapting on the fly, remembering your context. Pure list-CRUD chores don't clear that bar, and we've cut features that didn't.

Web access

Your pal can search the web and fetch pages it's been pointed to. This is the structural cure for an AI's worst habit — confidently making something up instead of saying "I can't check that." It runs on the AI provider's own native, server-side web tools, so the provider enforces the safety boundaries (a fetch can only open a URL already present in the conversation, which closes the data-exfiltration hole for free), and the search cost bills to your own key rather than ours. Web is a platform capability — part of the platform, never something sold or installed.

One setup note specific to BYOK: web search runs through your own provider account, so you turn it on once in your provider's console (for Claude, that's Settings → Privacy). Until you do, a search comes back empty instead of the pal quietly making something up.

Seeing photos

Hand your pal a photo right in the chat and it can read it — a kid's camp schedule straight onto the calendar, a recipe card into the library, a label or a handwritten note. The pal isn't running an "image tool" it calls; the picture simply arrives in the conversation and it looks at it the way it reads your words. It sees only what you share in the chat — not your camera roll, not a live camera, not the images on a web page — and if seeing isn't switched on for your pal, it tells you plainly instead of guessing what's in a picture. (A small honest note on the mechanics: a shared photo is resized and stripped of its location metadata before it's stored, and the pal reads it once — it isn't re-sent on every later message.)

Honest about reach

A pal always knows which channels it actually has — in-app chat, plus email and push notifications if you've turned them on — and it never pretends to a reach it doesn't have. Push notifications land on your phone or computer even when pal.fun is closed; you turn them on per device (on an iPhone you first add pal.fun to your Home Screen). It doesn't choose how a message goes out — it writes the message, and the platform delivers it on whatever channels you've enabled. If a pal can't do something, it tells you, or helps you without it. It is never a salesman for features it doesn't have.