How Agent Ethan Decides What to Tap Next

Agent Ethan decides what to tap next by sorting every action it could take into one of three plain categories: things that are easy to undo, things that leave the phone, and things that cannot be undone. The category decides what happens, not a mood or a guess made in the moment. Anything easy to undo just happens. Anything that leaves the phone, like sending a message or placing a call, checks with you first by default. Anything that cannot be undone, like paying a bill or a permanent delete, stops by default and hands the phone back to you.

The one rule behind every tap

Ethan works in a loop. It looks at what is on screen, decides on a single next step toward the goal you gave it (a tap, some typing, or a scroll), does that one step, then looks again before deciding the next one. It keeps repeating this until the task is finished or it needs you. Before each single step, it sorts that one action into one of three categories, and the category is what decides whether it proceeds on its own or waits for you.

This sorting is consistent. It does not change by app, by time of day, or by how the request was worded. A tap that opens a calculator app is sorted the same way at nine in the morning as it is at midnight. That consistency is the point: once you know the three categories, you can predict what Ethan will ask you about before it ever shows you a plan.

• Easy to undo: opening an app, typing in a box, scrolling, switching screens
• Leaves the phone: sending a message, placing a call, posting, submitting a form
• Cannot be undone: paying, buying, a permanent delete, a factory reset

Easy to undo: it just does it

The first category covers anything you could reverse with another tap: opening an app, typing a word into a search box, scrolling down a page, switching from one screen to another. None of these reach outside the app in front of you, and none are hard to walk back if a step turns out to be wrong. So Ethan does these on its own, step by step, without stopping to ask.

This is most of what a task actually involves. Finding a contact, opening a map, scrolling to the right message in a long thread: these are the many small steps that make up a single spoken goal like checking yesterday's grocery list. If Ethan paused to confirm every scroll, the whole point of asking it would be lost. So it saves your attention for the moments that matter.

Leaves the phone: it checks with you first, by default

The second category covers actions that go further: they leave the phone, reach another person, or otherwise act outside the screen in front of you. Sending a text, placing a call, posting to a group, and submitting a form are the clearest examples. These are not as easy to walk back as a scroll, so by default Ethan shows you what it is about to send and waits for your go-ahead before it does.

If you would rather not confirm every single one of these, there is a setting for that. Under Settings > Agent > Autonomy, you can allow Ethan to send, call, post, or submit on its own when it is confident, instead of checking each time. That choice is yours to make, and it changes only this one category. It has no effect on the third category below.

Cannot be undone: it stops, by default

The third category is the smallest and the strictest: actions that cannot be reversed at all once they happen. Paying for something, buying an item, confirming an order, and a permanent delete all belong here, along with a factory reset. For these, Ethan does not offer itself a confident shortcut. By default, it stops before the final step and hands the phone back to you.

There is one nuance worth knowing. A plain delete is not automatically treated as final. If an app moves what you deleted into a trash or bin you can restore from, the kind of pattern Google's own Google Photos help pages describe, where deleted items sit in a trash for a period before they are erased for good, that action behaves more like something easy to undo. It is only a delete with no way back, a permanent one, that Ethan treats the same way it treats a payment, by default: it stops and waits for you.

A few things it stays away from, by default

Outside the three categories, a short list of things sits apart entirely, because Ethan is built to skip them rather than sort them. By default, Agent Ethan skips passwords, PINs, and one-time codes: it does not read them, type them, or ask you to say them out loud. Critical settings are stronger still: a factory reset or removing an account from the phone is never carried out, even if you ask for it directly, because this limit is built into the app itself rather than decided case by case.

The signals that show the rule in action

You do not have to take any of this on faith, because the rule shows up on screen while Ethan works. It starts with a short plan, "On it," before it takes a single step. A small pill stays visible the whole time with Pause and Stop, so you can interrupt at any point. A hollow gold ring marks the exact control it is about to press next, so you always see what is coming before it happens. And when it genuinely cannot tell which step is right, it offers numbered choices and waits for your answer instead of guessing.

Put together, the plan, the pill, the ring, and the numbered choices are the visible half of the same rule described above: easy-to-undo steps happen quietly, and anything bigger shows itself before it happens. Task history stays on your phone afterward, and you can clear it any time from Settings.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Delete photos & videos (Google Photos Help)

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