Personas

Toggle different styles for your AI

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.

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.

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.

Permission Presets

Most personas work well with a permission preset:

Preset	What it can do
All access	Everything — no restrictions
Workspace	Files, web, media, and read access to settings/hosting/commerce — no shell, no communications
Read only	Read files, search the web, and view settings — can’t modify anything
Chat only	Conversation 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.

Full list of available scopes

When using custom scopes, you can grant access to specific categories:

Scope	Description
files:read	Read files and search the workspace
files:write	Create and edit files (requires files:read)
shell:execute	Run shell commands
web:search	Search web, images, and maps
web:browse	Open and interact with web pages
media:generate	Generate images, video, and diagrams
media:transcribe	Transcribe audio and video
comms:email	Send emails
comms:sms	Send SMS
comms:telegram	Telegram messages
comms:discord	Discord messages and history
comms:slack	Slack messages
settings:read	View personas, agents, and rules
settings:manage	Edit personas, agents, and rules (requires settings:read)
hosting:read	View sites and services
hosting:manage	Manage sites and services (requires hosting:read)
commerce:read	View payments and orders
commerce:manage	Manage products and payments (requires commerce:read)
device:use	Use 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.