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Foundations

The Senses — Perception as a Layer

Most software treats integrations as side doors. You connect Gmail to your CRM to fix a specific gap. You bolt on Slack to Zapier to send notifications. Each connection is a one-off shim.

River treats them differently. Integrations, the Browser Extension, and Computer Use are not bolt-ons — they're the perception layer of an operating system. Together they answer the question: how does the world get in?

This is the layer that turns River from an app (which only knows what you typed into it) into an OS (which knows what's happening around you).

What "the world" means#

When we say "external stimuli", we mean things like:

  • An email arriving
  • A calendar event being scheduled
  • A new file showing up in Drive
  • A teammate posting in Slack
  • A Stripe charge happening
  • A page you read on the web
  • A meeting recording being made
  • A native app on your screen showing something interesting

In a normal stack, each of those lives in its own silo. To act on them you have to switch tools, copy-paste, or write a custom integration.

In River, every one of them flows in through the Senses and becomes an entity in the same world model. Once it's an entity, every other layer can act on it.

The four channels#

Integrations — always-on#

The most common channel. Connect a service once and its data flows in continuously. Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Slack, Stripe, GitHub, Plaid, Crisp, HubSpot, Notion — 100+ services, with new ones added regularly.

This is the highest-leverage Sense for most people, because the highest-volume signals come through it (mail and calendar especially).

Browser Extension — the open web#

Anything not behind an API. Clipping a research article, saving a tweet, capturing a YouTube transcript, screenshotting a page that doesn't have a clean export. The Browser Extension is how you turn the open internet into entities you can act on.

Computer Use — your screen#

When River runs as a desktop app, it can see what you're working on across native applications and (with permission) operate them on your behalf. This is how you get Senses into worlds that have no API at all — vendor portals, legacy software, niche SaaS that hasn't caught up.

Direct ingestion — drop and drag#

Sometimes you just have a file. Drag it in. River extracts text, recognizes type, indexes content, proposes structured entities (Companies from a contract, Tasks from a transcript). No setup.

Why this layer exists in its own right#

The reason "Senses" deserves its own conceptual layer — not just "integrations" or "data sources" — is that the substrate matters. In an app, you connect data sources to give the app some content to work with. In an OS, the perception layer is what lets every other layer be alive at all:

  • The Home (entity system) has things to hold because the Senses provide them.
  • The Nervous System (event stream) has events to record because the Senses fire them.
  • The Intelligence (agents) has work to do because the Senses generate triggers.
  • The Surface has things to display because the Senses fed the entity tree.

Take away the Senses and River reduces to a fancy notes app. Wire them up and the workspace comes alive.

What changes once you connect them#

A few patterns become possible only after you've connected your real Senses:

  • Morning briefings that actually know your day — because Calendar is live, Mail is live, your Tasks are live.
  • Inbox triage Agents that understand context — because they can see who's emailing, who that person is in your relationship graph, and what projects they're connected to.
  • Custom views that pull live data — because the data is already in your Dataspace.
  • Auto-prep before meetings — because the AI can join up Calendar, Contacts, Mail, and Drive in one query.
  • Compliance-grade audit trails — because every external signal lands as a structured event with a timestamp and an actor.

None of this requires custom integration work. It works because the perception layer is part of the OS.

What you connect first#

If you're new to River, the highest-leverage Senses are the ones with the densest signal:

  1. Gmail — the most common starting point
  2. Google Calendar — second-most
  3. Slack — if your team uses it
  4. Drive — for any team that lives in shared docs
  5. The Browser Extension — for anything from the open web

Connect those five and you have a workspace that already feels intelligent. Add the Desktop App and Computer Use when you want capabilities that a browser can't provide.

Privacy#

The Senses are opt-in, scoped, and revocable:

  • You choose which folders, labels, accounts sync.
  • You can pause an integration without disconnecting.
  • Computer Use needs OS-level permissions you grant explicitly.
  • All credentials are encrypted (Fernet, per-user).
  • Disconnect anytime; previously-ingested entities stay where they are.

Tips#

  • Don't connect all 100 integrations on day one. Connect the 3–5 that matter and let the system show you what it can do.
  • For sensitive data, prefer self-hosted River so the Senses' output never leaves your network.
  • Every Sense has tools the AI can use. After connecting, ask SpaceChat: "what can you do with the things I just connected?" — it'll show you.