Watching & taking control

Everything your assistant does on its computer can happen in front of you. During a Unify Meet call you can open a live view of its desktop, watch it work in real time, and — when you want hands on the wheel — take over its mouse and keyboard yourself.

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The controls, in the call toolbar

The center of the Meet toolbar holds the screen-sharing controls: the button for sharing your screen, and next to it a two-button pill for the assistant’s desktop. The assistant-desktop buttons unlock in stages, and the tooltip tells you where you are: “Available after assistant joins” until the call is fully up, then “Assistant desktop is starting up…” while the machine wakes (calls connect voice-first, so you’re talking well before this — the button enables mid-call, no reconnect needed), and finally Show assistant screen when everything’s ready.

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Watching: the live desktop view

Click Show assistant screen and the main call area becomes the assistant’s actual desktop, streaming live — you’ll see a brief “Starting assistant screen sharing…” and then the machine itself. Browser tabs opening, text being typed, the file manager, the terminal: whatever the assistant is doing, as it does it. A few things about the view:

• It’s view-only by default. A transparent guard sits over the screen — hover it and you’ll see “Enable interactive mode to take control”. Your clicks touch nothing until you explicitly opt in.
• It scales with the window. The desktop fits itself to the call window, whether that’s the full-size dialog, a floating window, or docked above chat — and fullscreen is available for detail work. (If you shrink a floating call very small, the desktop controls tuck away until you enlarge it.)
• Your assistant knows you’re watching. The moment you open or close the view it’s told — “User enabled assistant screen sharing” — so it narrates naturally while you watch and never treats the screen as private.
• Both directions at once. Sharing your own screen doesn’t conflict: your share (or camera) rides along as a small picture-in-picture in the corner while the assistant’s desktop fills the main view, and you can maximize or minimize your self-view at any time.

Click Hide assistant screen to return to the avatar; the assistant’s work carries on either way.

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Taking control

With the screen showing, the pointer button toggles interactive mode — you’ll see “Interactive mode enabled.” and the guard overlay lifts. From that moment your mouse and keyboard drive the assistant’s machine directly:

• Your assistant steps back. It’s notified the instant you take over (“User took remote control of assistant desktop”) and pauses its own computer actions rather than fighting you for the mouse. It stays on the call, watching and talking with you.
• You have the full machine. Open and close apps, click through the browser, type in the terminal — anything the assistant can do at its desk, you can do from yours.
• Hand back any time. Toggle again (“View-only mode enabled.”) or just hide the screen. Your assistant is told control was released and picks the work back up, taking a fresh look at the screen to account for anything you changed.

This is true joint work on one machine — you drive while it watches, it drives while you watch, swapping as often as you like within the call.

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What the mode is for

Seeing the apps it’s using. The live view is the honest answer to “what is it actually doing?” — watch it fill in the web form, work the spreadsheet, run the script. It’s the natural companion to a first run of anything new: a freshly taught workflow, a new task firing, a tool it hasn’t used before. Navigating its filesystem — both ways. The assistant’s machine has a persistent workspace — the Attachments folder where your files land, the outputs it has produced, everything it has downloaded and built. The screen view is how you explore it:

• Watch it navigate. Ask — “show me what’s in the project folder”, “open the report you generated last week” — and watch it work through the file manager or terminal on screen, narrating as it goes.
• Or browse yourself. Enable mouse & keyboard control and open the file manager with your own hands: poke through folders, open files, check what’s actually on disk — exactly as you’d lean over a colleague’s desk. (There’s no separate file-transfer widget in the call; when you want a file sent to you, just ask — it arrives as a chat attachment or email moments later.)

Demonstrating and fixing. For fiddly procedures, take control and do it once while narrating — your assistant learns from what it sees. And when something’s gone sideways, taking the wheel to fix it directly beats describing the fix in words.

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Good habits

• Watch the first run of anything new — a small correction on run one beats a cleanup on run ten.
• Talk while you drive. The call is still live in both directions — the combination of your hands and your commentary is the richest teaching signal there is.
• Never type secrets on its screen. Passwords and API keys belong in the secure Integrations flows, not typed into a shared desktop — your assistant will never ask you to.