Quick Start
Your first fifteen minutes with Zinley: create an account, let it get to know you, then give it the two things that make it useful — an email address and a phone number of its own.
You don't have to do these in order, and you can leave and come back at any point.
1. Sign up
Open zinley.com/dashboard. There are two ways in:
- Email and password — enter your name, email, and a password (at least 8 characters, with an uppercase letter, a lowercase letter, a number, and a symbol). Zinley emails you a 6-digit verification code; type it in to finish. The code is good for 15 minutes, and you can request a new one if it expires.
- Continue with Google — one click, no code, no password to remember.
Then you land on Home. See Download & Install if you'd also like the desktop app.
2. Let Zinley get to know you (optional, but do it)
The quickest way to shape your agent is to talk to it for a couple of minutes. On the setup checklist, choose Talk to Zinley to start a short in-app voice chat.
It's a real conversation, not a form. Zinley asks about:
- the vibe you want it to have — warm, brisk, formal, funny
- how it should handle people it doesn't know who call or write
- how involved you want to be in email — always CC'd, or hands-off
- any standing preferences it should carry into every conversation
Two to four minutes is enough. When you hang up, Zinley reads the transcript and proposes a set of personality settings — voice, greeting style, primary language, how much detail to take in a message, your email involvement, and custom instructions.
Nothing is saved until you say so. You get a review screen: change anything you don't like, then save. You can revisit all of it later in Agent setup.
Prefer filling in fields yourself? Choose Tune personality instead and set them directly.
3. Send your first message
Open Chat and just ask for something.
Good first prompts:
- "What can you actually do for me?"
- "Research the best noise-cancelling headphones under $300 and give me a recommendation."
- "Plan my day and highlight what needs me."
A lot of Zinley's abilities have no button — you get at them by asking in chat. Scheduling a recurring task, building a website, generating an image, teaching it a new skill: all of it starts as a sentence.
4. Claim your agent's email address
Your agent gets its own address in the form yourname@me.zinley.com.
- Go to Your agent's email address and pick a username — 3 to 30 characters, lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens. Zinley checks availability and suggests alternatives.
- Choose carefully: you only get to change it once. After that it's locked. (The old address keeps receiving mail for about 90 days.)
- Try it out — email the address directly, or CC it on a thread you're already having.
Zinley reads the whole conversation, replies when it can, and loops you in when a decision is yours.
5. Get a phone number
Give your agent a real phone line so it can answer calls for you.
- Go to Get a number and search — by country, area code, or the digits you want in it.
- Claim it. Your first number's first month is free (you'll still need a valid card on file).
- Call it from your own phone. That's the fastest way to hear the voice and greeting you chose, and to see the summary Zinley sends afterwards.
Tune how it answers in Agent setup, and add your own number to trusted callers so Zinley recognises you.
6. Connect a device
Install the desktop app on a computer and sign in — the machine registers itself as a device automatically. From then on Zinley can work directly on it: files, terminal, browser, local apps.
Leave the app running in the background and the device shows as online. See Connect a device.
What happens next
You're set up. From here Zinley starts building memory on its own — a profile for each person it deals with in People, a file per matter in Topics, and a summary of it all each morning in your Daily Brief.
One thing to expect early on: by default Zinley asks before doing anything outward-facing. Sending an email or committing to something on a call comes back to you as a proposal first. That's the Confirm autonomy setting, and you can change it whenever you're ready.
Related
- Core Concepts — the ideas behind all of the above.
- Interface Tour — a map of the whole app.
- Chat — go deeper on your main way of working.
- Plans & Limits — what your plan includes.