What Is Lava Desktop

Lava Desktop is a Mac and Windows app that keeps your connected apps (email, calendar, Slack, CRM, notes, and more) as live, signed-in tabs in a single window. On the right sits the Lava desktop agent, a conversational panel where you delegate tasks in plain language. The agent can read what’s on the active tab, take actions across your apps through the Lava gateway, and show the result back on the tab. No window switching or copying and pasting required.

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Who It’s For

Lava Desktop is for people who work across many apps and want an agent to handle the cross-app coordination for them. If your workday involves moving between email, calendar, Slack, and a CRM to do something that could be a single sentence of intent (“pull the action items from today’s calls and draft follow-up emails for each”), Lava Desktop is built for that. No developer setup is required. You sign in, connect your apps, and ask.

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How It Works

The agent does its work in two ways, with different levels of risk. Reading the active tab for context is low-risk. When you ask the agent about something on screen (summarizing an email thread, pulling up a calendar event), it reads the page you are on and responds. Nothing leaves your device except the content it needs to answer. Acting through the Lava gateway is how the agent gets real work done. To send an email, create a calendar event, post to Slack, or update a CRM record, the agent calls the app’s API through the Lava gateway. By default (Normal mode), the agent works through a task on its own and pauses only before high-stakes actions: sending a message, deleting data, making a payment, or sharing something externally. When it pauses, it shows you an Approve action card with a plain-language description of exactly what it will do, plus Approve and Decline buttons. Routine reads and low-risk writes run without a pause. If you want the agent to pause before every write, switch to Careful mode. If you want it to run the full task without any pauses, switch to Auto mode.

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What You Can Do

The agent works across all your connected apps in a single conversation. A few things it can do:

• Triage and draft replies in your inbox
• Schedule meetings and pull context from your calendar
• Post messages and search threads in Slack
• Search, summarize, and update records in a CRM
• Pull action items from meeting notes and route them

You can also save tasks you run repeatedly as workflows and trigger them from the input bar with /. The agent asks before it acts on ambiguous references. If it cannot ground a reference (a person’s name that appears in multiple threads, for example), it asks you to clarify rather than guessing. For a deeper look at the mechanics behind the gateway and the approval gate, see How Lava Desktop Works.

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How This Differs from the Lava MCP

The Lava MCP (see its Quickstart) connects your AI chat (Claude, ChatGPT, and similar tools) to services through the gateway. You bring the AI chat; Lava handles auth and billing for the services it calls. Lava Desktop is the full environment: the app tabs, the agent, and the gateway all in one window. You do not need a separate AI chat client.

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How This Differs from Build with Lava Gateway

Build with Lava Gateway is for developers who route their own application’s requests through the Lava gateway, either to save on API costs or to let end users pay from their own balance. Lava Desktop is for doing work, not for building a product. If you want to get tasks done across your apps, Lava Desktop is the surface. If you want to add gateway routing to something you are building, Build with Lava Gateway is the right tab.

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What Lava Desktop Is Not

Lava Desktop is not a read-only assistant that tells you things. It acts in your real accounts. It can send email, update records, and post to Slack on your behalf. Before it sends, deletes, or pays, it pauses for your approval. It is not a chatbot wrapper over your apps. The agent works through the Lava gateway, which means it calls each app’s actual API rather than scraping what it can see on screen.

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Next Steps