App Tours & Coaching

What it is

Omniscio teaches you about itself in two ways: guided app tours and coaching tips.

App tours are overlay walkthroughs: starting one dims the app, spotlights a real element on screen, and shows a card explaining it. Each step is a spotlight step — it highlights a named control, or any element the tour points at — or an overlay step, a full-screen centred card used for welcome and completion screens. A step's body may carry richer blocks: bullets, a list, a tip, a prerequisite, a "try it" prompt or a keyboard-shortcut chip. Tours are written as data and validated at app start, so a broken one cannot ship.

Tours are opt-in — nothing force-runs; you start each from Settings. Roughly twenty ship, several of which offer themselves the first time you switch on the feature they cover (Gmail, Voice commands, Screen Capture, the Mind Map and Tasks). Finishing one can chain into the next — a tour may declare a follow-up and a toast invites you into it. An interactive demo runs to a few dozen steps on a sandboxed workspace (fake projects and sessions in the real dashboard), so you can watch the full cycle without touching real data; some steps are hands-on.

Coaching tips are the nudge half: when Omniscio notices you doing something the hard way — clicking Archive over and over, or never having opened a feature it thinks you would want — it can raise a short, dismissible card in your Inbox explaining the faster path. They are deliberately low-volume.

Where to find it

• Tours: Settings → Setup Wizards lists every available tour, checkmarks the ones you have finished, and runs the one you pick. The interactive demo and the gated guided welcome walkthrough have their own cards there; the demo is also offered during first-time setup.
• Coaching tips: Settings → AI Coach, on the Coaching card — the master switch, the per-category toggles, and the tip catalogue with each tip's state. The tips themselves arrive in your Inbox.

How it behaves

Tour behaviour

• Stepping. Next and Back move through a tour; dots at the top of the card show the phase (an unlabelled phase, usually the completion screen, gets no dot).
• Restarting or skipping. Esc exits and Skip ends a tour early; both mark it completed, so it checkmarks in the list and its automatic offer never returns. Replay a tour from Setup Wizards.
• Hands-on steps. The demo can hide Next and wait for you to perform the highlighted action; if you stall or the target never appears, a "Show me" escape appears, so nobody is stuck.
• Chaining and offers. A tour that declares a follow-up pops a toast about a second later, suppressed once you are experienced (ten or more sessions). A first-use offer arrives at most once per install, desktop only.
• The sandbox. While the demo runs, your real projects and sessions are hidden and restored when it ends; a practice tour of session management runs the same way, from the toolbar's Tours menu.

The coaching (nudge) engine

• It ships off — no tip fires until Enable coaching tips is on in Settings → AI Coach.
• What triggers one. An action counter (archiving repeatedly, sending too many replies by hand) or a time-based condition (a feature installed but never used); counters are checked as you act, and a periodic sweep re-checks the time-based ones.
• Where it surfaces. A normal Inbox card, not a pop-up — same dismiss and snooze rules as any other row, with a button to the setting when a tip names one.
• Limits. A cooldown between tips, a daily cap, and a short quiet period after launch; each tip fires only once, so dismissing a card is effectively permanent.
• Turning it down. The master switch silences everything; the categories — Keyboard Shortcuts, Voice Commands, Productivity, Navigation, Advanced Features — switch off individually, and shortcut tips are hidden on a phone. Reset all clears every tip's state and trigger counters.

For agents

• Tours: src/renderer/src/features/app-tour/ — AppTour.tsx (overlay; NEXT_TOUR_SUGGESTION_DELAY_MS = 1000, EXPERIENCED_USER_SESSION_THRESHOLD = 10), the registry tour-steps.ts (getAllTours/getTourById/SETTINGS_MENU_HIDDEN_TOUR_IDS), tour-schema.ts, and one JSON per tour (tours/; 21 files, __example__ a hidden placeholder).
• First-use offers: useAutomaticTourOffer.ts (ids voice-commands, gmail, screen-recorder, mindmap, tasks-v2), once per install via the amc-tour-card-offered: key, under TOUR_OFFER_COOLDOWN_MS (5 min) in src/renderer/src/stores/app-tour-store.ts.
• Tours list UI: src/renderer/src/features/settings/sections/setup-assistant/SetupAssistantSettings.tsx (section id setup-assistant); the guided walkthrough and keyboard demo show only under unreleased flags (settings.onboardingTourEnabled, default false).
• The demo: tours/onboarding-demo.json (34 steps); scene blocks hydrate via resolveSceneRefs (src/renderer/src/features/onboarding/steps/demo-scenes.ts), driven by useDemoTour over DEMO_TOUR_IDS.
• Coaching engine: src/main/services/ — coaching-service.ts (fireTip), coaching-tip-catalog.ts (20 tips), coaching-checker.ts (30-minute sweep). Limits in src/shared/coaching-types.ts: COACHING_COOLDOWN_MS 45 min, COACHING_DAILY_CAP 3, COACHING_SNOOZE_DAYS 7, COACHING_STARTUP_DELAY_MS 5 min; categories in the CoachingCategory union.
• Off switch: AppSettings.coachingEnabled (default false) + coachingCategories (src/shared/types/settings/ai-features-settings.ts); tips surface via raiseAgentAlert (dedupKey coaching-tip:<id>); panel src/renderer/src/features/settings/CoachingSettings.tsx.

Related

• app-tour.md — every tour's slug, where it surfaces, the JSON shape, and authoring a tour or anchor.
• coaching-engine.md — the tip engine in depth: categories, trigger catalogue, cooldown and cap.
• ai-coaching.md — AI Coaching: structured Claude interviews that produce saved artifacts.
• inbox-alerts.md — the inbox cards a coaching tip and a first-use offer arrive on.
• keyboard-shortcuts.md — the shortcuts the keyboard demo and the Shortcuts tips teach.
• first-time-setup.md — the first-run flow the interactive demo runs inside.