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What Pip hears in a line

Pip reads a task the way you’d say it. Which words it understands, what it makes of them, and what it leaves exactly as you typed it.

Tue 6 Oct 2026 · 2 min read

When you type into the dot, Pip reads the line while you write it. The words it understands turn orange, and a smaller line underneath says what it made of them. All of that happens before you press Enter, so a wrong guess costs nothing.

Pip’s capture panel with the line pick up the parcel tomorrow 5:30pm. The words tomorrow 5:30pm are orange, and the line underneath reads Tomorrow, 17:30. — The real app (browser build). Two words understood, one task with a day and a time.

What it listens for

The list is short on purpose, so you can learn it in a minute.

Days: today, tomorrow, tonight, a weekday, this weekend, next week, someday.
Times: 3pm, 9:30am or 15:00, and a few words that mean a time, like morning for 09:00 and lunch for 12:30.
Places: “for car”, “in home” or #car, when you already have an area or project with that name.
Deadlines: “deadline thu”, or a date like “deadline 14 oct”.
Tags: any other word after a #.
Repeats: daily, every monday, every 3 days, every other week.

The capture panel with the line call mum every other week. The words every other week are orange, and underneath it reads Today, every 2 weeks. — A repeat, said the way you’d say it.

The capture panel with the line file the report deadline thu #work. The words deadline thu #work are orange, and underneath it reads Today, deadline Thu 8 Oct, #work. — A deadline and a tag in the same line.

What it leaves alone

Anything Pip doesn’t recognise stays in the title, exactly as you typed it. “Buy 3 tickets” is a task called Buy 3 tickets, because a 3 on its own isn’t a time. “25:00pm” isn’t a real time either, so it stays where it is.

A place has to exist before Pip will use it. “For the concert” only means something if you have a project called Concert. Pip never makes a project because of a word you happened to type.

The capture panel with the line buy 3 tickets for the concert, with no orange words, and underneath only Today. — Nothing understood, nothing orange. The line lands on the page you’re on.

Some things are left out because Pip can’t keep the promise yet. “Every weekday” would need a repeat that skips Saturday and Sunday, which the app doesn’t have, so those words stay plain. Turning them orange and then repeating on a Sunday would be worse than not understanding them.

Where it lands

When the line says nothing about a day, the page you’re on decides. On Today it lands today. On a project or an area it lands there, Someday and Anytime keep it in their own list, and anywhere else it goes to the Inbox. A time on its own means today. A day you say always beats the page.

The same line always means the same thing. There is no guessing from your habits and nothing that learns behind your back, which is also why every rule here fits in one list.