Personal preferences

Bird already carries a lot of context into each conversation: it remembers facts and decisions from your past chats (via its conversation memory), and it picks up whatever notes, projects, or files you’ve selected as live context. What it doesn’t infer is how you like to be helped — your role, your response-style preferences, the recurring asks Bird tends to get wrong. Personal preferences fill that gap. Personal preferences are a short note you write to Bird, about you. They’re injected into every conversation Bird has with you, so you don’t have to keep re-introducing yourself or restating how you like things. Visible only to you — never to your workspace.

Why use them

Without personal preferences, you end up repeating the same setup every conversation:

“I’m a postdoc, you can skip the basics. Always show units. Keep it concise.”

With personal preferences, you write that once in settings and Bird reads it before every reply. The benefits compound across daily use:

Calibrated explanations

Bird tailors depth and vocabulary to your expertise. Tell it you’re an expert in mass spectrometry but new to single-cell RNA-seq, and it will explain the latter without dumbing down the former.

Consistent communication style

Want concise responses? Specific citation style? A preferred tone? State it once. Bird applies it across chat, voice, and the live agent.

Recurring preferences that stick

Things that previously needed correcting in every conversation — “spell my name with the accent”, “never use em-dashes”, “always include a Methods bullet” — get respected from turn one.

Faster onboarding for new conversations

No more “first turn = configure Bird, second turn = actual question”. Every chat opens already focused on what you need.

How to write them

Free text. No format required. Write to Bird like you’d brief a new lab partner. A useful starting structure:

Who you are — role, field, experience level
Where Bird should calibrate up or down — topics you know cold, topics you’re still learning
How you like to communicate — response length, tone, citation style
Recurring preferences — things Bird has gotten wrong before, anything you don’t want to keep restating

Example

I'm a postdoc in computational neuroscience, four years in. Comfortable with
single-cell methods, Python, and statistical modelling. Still learning systems
neuroscience and electrophysiology — explain those topics like I'm new.

Communication:
- Default to concise. Bullet points where it helps; prose where it doesn't.
- Always include units alongside numbers; SI by default.
- No em-dashes.

Currently preparing an R01 renewal due 2026-06-01.

Where to set them

Settings → Preferences → Personal preferences for Bird Type or paste your preferences, hit Save. Changes apply to new conversations — Bird reads them at the start of each conversation, so existing chats keep their original context until they’re closed and reopened. Personal preferences have a 3,000-character cap — about 500 words, which is plenty. The character counter under the editor turns amber as you approach the limit and red if you exceed it; Bird performs best with focused, current preferences, so prune older items rather than expanding.

Privacy

Personal preferences are strictly private to you. No one in your workspace, including admins and owners, can read or edit them. They’re stored encrypted in your account and only injected into Bird conversations where you are the requester.

If you delete your account, your personal preferences are deleted with it.