An AI you can let speak in your community.
It answers repeated questions from what your group actually said, shows the message it stood on, and otherwise stays quiet.
my starter smells like acetone on day 4, do I throw it out?
May Vestry answer this?
- Is it a question
- Grounded in this group
- Has a person answered
- Cooldown elapsed
- Chat budget
- Workspace allowance
Illustrative example
The difference is not the model. It is what the answer stands on.
Plenty of assistants will answer in a Telegram group. The thing you are actually weighing is the day one of those answers is confidently wrong, in front of your members, under your name. Vestry is built so a reply either rests on something your community said, or is never sent.
does the cold retard change the feeding schedule?
An answer with nothing under it
Reasonable, general, and not what this cohort was taught. Nobody in the group can tell the difference until it costs them a loaf.
The same question, grounded
“Retard after the second feed, not instead of it. Keep the twice-daily schedule or you lose the rise.”
The source is not a footnote. It is the reason the answer was allowed to exist at all, and it is what lets a member check it against you.
Example from an invented community, written to show the shape of an answer. Not a customer conversation.
It starts empty, and fills from the day you add it.
A Telegram bot cannot read anything sent before it joined. That is the platform, not a setting, and no product can honestly promise otherwise. So Vestry begins knowing nothing about your group and keeps what is said from that day forward.
The shortcut is to seed the three or four answers you already repeat every week. Those count as sources from the first hour, with your name on them.
the acetone smell is just hunger
twice-daily 1:1:1 fixes it
throw it out only if it goes pink
cold retard changes the timing
This is also why the free plan has no countdown on it. A fortnight expires before a community has repeated itself enough for the product to be worth judging, and a trial that ends first tells neither of us anything.
Telegram decides what it hears. You decide the rest.
A bot promoted to administrator is delivered every message in the group. Telegram says so outright, and no vendor can switch that off for you. So the controls that matter are the two that are genuinely ours to give you: how long anything is kept, and whether it may speak at all.
Receives
Telegram decides this, not usThe bot is an administrator of this group, so Telegram delivers every message to it.
Retains
Our policy, and yours to setA month of the group's own history stays searchable. Older messages are deleted.
Voice
You decide this, per chatMay answer an unaddressed question, but only when every one of the conditions holds.
It may also answer a question nobody addressed to it, and only when all six conditions hold at once. The default budget is a few unprompted messages a day, not a few an hour.
It can stand on the last 30 days of your group, plus the answers you seeded by hand. Everything older is deleted, along with its index entry and any citation of it.
Every one of these, every time
- Is it a questionyes
- Grounded in this groupfound
- Has a person answerednot yet
- Cooldown elapsedclear
- Chat budgethas room
- Workspace allowancewithin plan
Retrieval has to return material from this community above a relevance threshold. That material is either something the group said after Vestry was added, or an answer an admin seeded by hand. No grounding means no unprompted answer.
Ten minutes to install. Longer to be useful.
Nothing to migrate and nothing to import, because there is nothing it could import. You can stop after any step without breaking anything, and the last step is the one that decides how soon it earns its place.
- 2 min
Create the bot
In BotFather, under your own community's name and avatar. The token stays yours and you can revoke it there at any time.
- 1 min
Connect it
Paste the token once. Vestry verifies it against Telegram and registers the webhook for you.
- 2 min
Add it to the group
The ordinary Telegram add-to-group flow, then a check with Telegram that you really do administer it.
- 5 min
Seed a few answers
The questions you already answer every week, in your words. This is the only thing it can stand on before your group has said anything new.
It starts silent either way. Voice is yours to grant later.
Every word it said, and every time it chose not to.
The audit log is on every plan, including the free one. Deletions land in it too, so the retention window is something you can see happening rather than a sentence in a policy.
- 14:22
Answered an unaddressed question about acetone smell
Sourdough Intensive - cohort 9
No, that is normal at day 4. It means the starter is hungry. Feed it twice a day at 1:1:1 and the acetone smell goes within about two days.
Standing on Marta Kung, 6 weeks ago
- 11:47
Deleted 1,204 messages that reached the end of the retention window
Umbra CLI - users
Their search index entries and every summary derived from them went at the same time. Nothing that was deleted can be cited again.
- 09:12
Declined to speak: no grounding found
Sourdough Intensive - cohort 9
Question about the cohort 10 schedule. Nothing said in this group since Vestry was added covers it, and no admin has seeded an answer for it.
Example audit entries from a demo workspace.
Vestry is not open yet.
It is being built, and before another line of it is written we are talking to people who run Telegram communities and are on the hook for what gets said in them. If that is you, this is the useful moment to say so.