Access and permissions

You decide what a connected AI assistant may do, one operation at a time, in Settings → MCP Access. Reading is on by default, changes to your content are off, and anything that trashes, archives or deletes is confirmed with you when your AI app can ask. Apps that cannot ask are refused, unless you turn on Allow deletes without confirmation.

The MCP switch

The switch at the top right of MCP Access turns MCP on or off for every connected app. It is off when you install TalkBar.

• Off: a connected app sees no TalkBar tools, and every operation answers that it is turned off. The permission switches below are greyed out.
• On: a connected app sees the TalkBar tools and can run the operations you switched on.

Read and Write switches

The Permissions card has one row per kind of data: Sessions, Notes, Projects, Action items, Knowledge, People, Topics, Markers, Chats, Documents, Calendar, Session Series, Scheduler, Exports, Workspace and Profile.

Each row has two switches:

Next to each row switch, a count such as 3/7 shows how many of its operations are on. The switch shows as on only when all of them are; switching a partly-on row turns them all on. Operations your organization blocked are left out of both the count and the switch; a row whose operations are all blocked shows a locked switch. The Read and Write badges in the card header count how many operations are on in total.

Single operations

Open a row (click its name) to see each operation with its own switch, a short description and its id, such as notes.create. Switch single operations on or off here when a whole row is more than you want, for example to let an assistant add notes but not trash them.

Operations that start work or remove something carry a Confirmation advised badge. The badge is a hint for you and for AI apps; the confirmation TalkBar enforces is the one for deletes described below.

Writes that are on by default

These write operations are on as soon as you turn MCP on. They plan meetings and move exports and background jobs along, rather than change your sessions, notes or knowledge:

calendar.skip, calendar.cancel, series.archive, exports.destination.delete and exports.rule.delete run through talkbar_delete, like every delete, so they are confirmed with you (or refused for apps that cannot ask). calendar.start never records: recording only starts in the app.

Quick buttons

Which tool runs what

TalkBar keeps reads, changes and deletes in separate MCP tools, so your AI app can treat them differently, for example run reads freely but ask you before changes:

The operations that only talkbar_delete runs are: notes.trash, projects.trash, sessions.trash, chats.trash, knowledge.archive, contacts.archive, organizations.archive, series.archive, action_items.remove, topics.delete, markers.delete, exports.destination.delete, exports.rule.delete, calendar.cancel and calendar.skip.

Restoring something from the Trash, unarchiving and other changes go through talkbar_change. See The five MCP tools for how each tool is called.

When a change takes effect

TalkBar checks your switches on every call, so a change in MCP Access applies to the next call without restarting anything.

• A switched-off operation answers with turned_off and the message "… is turned off in TalkBar. Ask the user to turn it on in TalkBar Settings > MCP Access." A good assistant then asks you.
• talkbar_tools lists switched-off operations under off, so the assistant can tell you which switch to turn on instead of assuming the operation does not exist.
• When a switch changes the tool list itself (for example, the first write turned on adds talkbar_change), TalkBar tells the app at its next call so it can refresh its tools. See Tool list changes.

Confirming deletes

Before a talkbar_delete call runs, TalkBar asks you to confirm it through your AI app, using MCP's way for a server to ask the user a question (called elicitation, in its form mode). This works only in apps that support it; for apps that cannot ask, see Apps that cannot ask. The question lists each operation and its ids:

An assistant wants TalkBar to run:
- notes.trash {"noteId":"note-k2v9w8x7c6b5n4m3l2j1h0g9"}
Confirm to run it, or decline to run nothing.

A few details:

• A call that would be refused anyway (an unknown or switched-off operation, a missing or wrong argument) is refused at once, without a question.
• A batch is asked about as a whole, with every operation in it listed. Other writes may share the batch.
• The question is in English.
• The command line never asks. It runs only what you typed yourself.

Apps that cannot ask

Some AI apps cannot show a question from a server. For those, TalkBar refuses every talkbar_delete call with confirmation_unavailable, and nothing runs, unless you turn on Allow deletes without confirmation in the Server Settings card.

Audit logging

Audit logging in Server Settings (off by default) makes the MCP server write a line for every tool call to its error output (stderr), with the operation and its arguments, and another when the call succeeds. Your AI app usually keeps that output in its MCP logs. Use it for debugging or to review what an assistant did. Export calls are logged without their arguments. The command line does not write audit lines.

Administrator rules

If your organization manages TalkBar on this computer, an administrator can limit MCP and the command line. You see it on MCP Access:

An administrator allows or blocks operations in groups:

A blocked operation is left out of the tool list and of talkbar_tools. If an assistant calls it anyway, it gets failed with a message saying the setting is managed by your organization.

What the command line ignores

talkbar-cli tools call, tools batch and search run what you type, as you. They:

• Ignore the MCP switch, every Read and Write switch, and Allow deletes without confirmation. The command line never asks for confirmation.
• Keep the administrator rules, your plan limits and every ownership check: a command reaches only your own workspaces in that data folder, and nothing is deleted permanently.

talkbar-cli serve is the MCP server, so it follows every switch on this page. See talkbar-cli.

Related

• MCP overview
• Set up MCP
• The five MCP tools
• Errors and limits
• MCP Access settings
• Operations reference