Soleil Scout

Soleil Scout is a text-message ingest bot. You text photos, clips, voice notes, PDFs or links and they land arranged on a Soleil Clusters canvas, grouped by what you said about them. No app, and no signup — an account and a board are created behind you the first time you text, and voice notes are transcribed so you can search them. Scout is invite-only for now, so /scout puts you on the list; the canvas is open today and the number you leave connects to the account you make.

Updated August 11, 2026

Scout exists because nobody installs an app in a parking lot on one bar of signal. It lives in the messages app already open on the phone.

Scout is invite-only and not yet running. The web half — the signup box, the instant sign-in links, the account plumbing — is deployed. The bot itself is not, so no message is sent or received today. Joining at /scout puts you on the list and you are texted when you are in. The canvas is open in the meantime. Make an account and the number you left connects to it when Scout reaches you — see Joining from the waitlist.

The idea

Text what you are looking at. It lands on an infinite canvas your whole team can open.

Two hundred photos in an afternoon all land in one undifferentiated camera roll. Saying what a thing is while standing in front of it is the cheapest possible moment to organize it — and it is the only moment when you actually know.

How it works

1. Text the number. Send your first photo. A board and an account are created behind you — no form, no password.
2. Say what it is. Add "Scene 4 diner" or "power drops look sketchy". Scout reads it and titles the group.
3. Keep shooting. Send twelve more. They batch into one tidy grid instead of twelve replies and twelve piles.
4. Tap the link. Land on your canvas, signed in, with exactly the photos you just sent already selected.
5. File it later. Everything collects in your Scout Bin. Say "put these in Diner Recce" and Scout confirms what will move before it moves anything.

What you can send

Free-plan size limits are the same ones the canvas applies to a dropped file — 30 MB for video, 50 MB for audio, 50 MB for a PDF. Anything larger, and any other file type, needs Creator. Scout says which files it could not take rather than dropping them quietly.

Where and when a photo was taken

Scout reads the capture time and, where the phone included it, the coordinates from a photo's EXIF data and keeps both on the card. When a batch has coordinates, the group's heading carries a map link for the place.

Nothing is looked up, sent anywhere, or shown publicly — it travels with the card, the same way a photo's average colour does.

Batching

Twelve photos means twelve messages seconds apart. Scout waits until you have stopped — roughly twenty seconds of quiet — then lays everything out once and sends one reply.

While it works, a single message is edited in place through the stages rather than sending a new one each time: Got 12 photos — working on it… → Uploading 3 of 12… → Arranging on Scout Bin… → the confirmation.

The Scout Bin

Unfiled things collect in your Scout Bin. It is the default destination, so you never have to decide where something goes at the moment you are shooting it.

Say /board Diner Recce and that thread's target changes — the target is sticky, so everything after goes there until you change it again. /board with no name puts you back in the Bin.

If the board does not exist, Scout offers to make it and waits for you to reply CREATE. It never invents a board from a name it merely heard, because a typo would otherwise become a second board with half your work in it.

Moves are always confirmed before they happen, and a rendered contact sheet of what is about to move is sent before the text asking you to confirm. Moves can be undone.

Finding things again

Say find diner, or /find diner, and Scout tells you which boards match and links you to the one with the most hits.

It searches titles, notes, whatever you said about a photo when you sent it, and the text of your voice notes — which is the whole reason they are transcribed. It only ever searches boards you can already write to.

Commands

Anything that is not a command is treated as content — or, if it is an instruction ("put these in Diner Recce") it is obeyed, and if it is a question it is answered.

Stopping

Text STOP and Scout stops. It is recorded against your number, so nothing further is sent and the signup queue is blocked as well. START resumes.

Stopping does not touch your boards, your photos or your account. To delete the account itself, use Settings → Profile in the app.

Joining from the waitlist

Leaving your number at /scout puts you on the list and offers you the web app, which is open today. If you make an account there, the number you left is claimed by it.

A claim is a request, not a connection. It gives that account no ability to receive your messages, and nothing is bound until the phone itself says so — because anyone can type anyone's number into a web form, and the only proof that you hold a phone is that you texted from it.

So the first time that number texts Scout, Scout offers:

You already made a Clusters account — you@studio.com. Reply YES and this number connects to it, so everything you send goes straight there.

Reply YES and the phone is bound, along with anything you had already sent. Ignore it and everything stays where it is; the offer keeps until you take it.

Listing a pending claim in your settings is built but not switched on yet, for the same reason as everything else here. Nothing acts on a claim until the phone confirms, so an unrecognised number cannot reach your boards in the meantime.

Connecting to an existing account

Binding a phone to an account you already have is built but not switched on, for the same reason as everything else here: there is no line to text. When it is, you will get a connect code from your settings and text it once.

If you started from Scout with no account, a claim flow attaches an email address to the shell account created behind your number.

Links

Confirmations include a link into the canvas with the cards you just sent already selected. For accounts with no email yet, that is a signed link that signs you in directly — valid for 30 minutes, then it expires and you request another.

Limits

Texted cards count against your card allowance like any other. The free allowance is per account — see Plans — and Scout tells you your own number if you ask it "how much is this?".

Scout warns you once, at 75% of the cap, and tells you where you stand in each confirmation past halfway. At the cap it says so plainly rather than silently dropping photos.

There is also a rolling daily ceiling on how much one number can send. It is abuse protection rather than a plan limit, and it sits far above anything a day's scouting produces.

Transport

iMessage is the confirmed transport. SMS and RCS are not confirmed, and nothing here promises Android until they are. This page will say so when that changes.

Machine-readable: /docs/scout.md · /llms.txt
What changed and when: /changelog