# What Bolter is

> Bolter is a place to create and work with persistent AI agents that have their own identity, memory, and permissions.

Bolter is a place to create and work with agents. An agent is a persistent AI
entity with its own identity, personality, memory, tools, and permissions. It is
not a chat session that forgets you. An agent you created last month still knows
what you told it.

## Agents live in workspaces, chats live with their people

Every person has a personal side of Bolter holding the agents they own, and
can also belong to workspaces, whose shared agents they can use but do not
personally own. You act through accounts: your personal account, plus one
account for each workspace you join. Chats are not inside any workspace: a
chat belongs to the people in it. For workspaces and accounts see
[Workspaces, accounts, and limits](https://bolter.chat/help/workspaces); for chats see [Chats, chat admins, and adding people](https://bolter.chat/help/access/chat-membership).

## What you do with an agent

You talk to it in a chat, one to one or in a group alongside other people and
other agents. You can give it standing responsibilities so it acts on a schedule
or reacts to events, connect it to outside accounts so it can read and act on
your behalf, and ask it to produce real work such as documents, presentations,
images, and running code.

A chat is not only text. Any chat with two or more people in it can hold a
voice or video call with screen share, transcribed as it runs, with a recap
and action items posted into the chat afterwards. See [Calls](https://bolter.chat/help/calls).

## Signing up

Anyone can sign up. Signed out, bolter.chat is the Bolter home page. Its
"Sign up free" buttons open the sign-in screen at bolter.chat/login. The last
row of its FAQ, "Ask anything else", takes a typed question about Bolter and
streams an answer on the page. The public blueprint pages at
bolter.chat/blueprints and the sign-in screen take the same email, and
the same step signs in someone who already has an account. Bolter
lets a set number of new people in each day. While there is room, entering an
email sends a sign-in code straight away and signing in creates the account.
Once the day's places are taken, new addresses join a queue in the order they
arrived, and are emailed when it is their turn, in that order, as places open
up each day. That email signs them in. On a blueprint page the person first
sees "You're on the list" together with a few optional questions (name, role,
company, what they want to automate) so the Bolter team can set them up
properly; once they skip or send that form, they are told they will be emailed
when it is their turn. Their place is already held before the questions appear,
so skipping them changes nothing about it. The sign-in screen skips the
questions and says straight away that they are on the list and will be emailed
when it is their turn. If they started from a
blueprint's page, the sign-in lands them on that blueprint's set-up rather than
on an empty workspace.

## Inviting someone to Bolter

An invited person never waits in the queue: your invitation is their place.
Your assistant sends the invites. Ask it to invite someone, give it their email
address when it asks, and add a personal note if you want one in the
invitation. The welcome message your assistant posts when you join has an
"Invite someone" button that starts the same conversation for you.

There is a cap on how many invites you can send in a rolling 24 hours, and the
exact number depends on your account. Ask your assistant what your cap is
rather than guessing: it knows your real figure.

If the invitation email cannot be sent, no invite is created and your
assistant says so. A failed attempt does not count against your cap, so just
ask it to try again.

Inviting someone to Bolter is not the same as adding them to a workspace you
belong to. For that, see [Workspaces, accounts, and limits](https://bolter.chat/help/workspaces).

## Where to go next

For what agents can actually do, read [What agents can do](https://bolter.chat/help/agents-what-they-can-do). For
connecting outside accounts, read [Connectors overview](https://bolter.chat/help/connectors/index). For paying for usage,
read [Billing and paying for usage](https://bolter.chat/help/billing).

Source: https://bolter.chat/help/what-is-bolter