We’ve put together answers to some of the most common questions families have about using Kiki. This includes how Kiki works, its current limitations, and what to do if something doesn’t seem to be working as expected.
Kiki is a mobile app for parents and carers that helps them keep track of school and club communications. It reduces mental load by turning emails and attachments into clear summaries and easy one tap calendar entries, giving families a shared understanding of what’s happening and when.
Kiki is currently available to families with children attending schools in England and Wales. Support for schools in other countries will require additional changes, and we plan to expand availability in future. In the meantime, you can join our mailing list to be notified when Kiki becomes available in your region.
In Kiki, a family is a shared space for the people you choose to stay organised with. This might include parents, carers, a nanny, a neighbour who helps with school drop offs, or anyone else you want to invite. During the pilot, there’s no limit on the number of family members you can add.
Kiki can process any email the user has approved from a connected account. However, we have optimised our system for emails sent by schools and clubs, such as newsletters, letters, announcements, reminders and event notifications.
Yes, Kiki processes both the email body text as well as any attachments sent with emails. At present we are limited to only being able to process PDF files but are expecting to add other file compatibilities soon.
No. When adding a new child, only a small number of fields are required, and these are all on the first screen. The remaining information is optional and can be added later. Adding more detail helps Kiki work more effectively for your family, reduces the need for manual input and improves how well information is captured. You can update this at any time.
Kiki currently supports UK schools only. If your child’s school is outside the UK, it won’t appear in the search results.
If the school is in the UK, first check that the name is spelled correctly. Searches aren’t case sensitive, but punctuation and wording do matter, for example St versus Saint. If the school still doesn’t appear, try typing just the first three or four letters of the most distinctive part of the name, ignoring words like The, St, or Catholic. If you still can’t find it, please contact us using the Send us feedback option in the Settings menu so we can help.
Kiki is currently available as a mobile app on iOS and Android. A web version is planned for the future.
Kiki is still in development and is currently being tested as part of a pilot. We’re happy with the core experience, but some features are still evolving and you may occasionally encounter bugs. The pilot gives families the chance to use Kiki in real life and share feedback that helps shape what we build next.
During the pilot, users have free access to Kiki’s full feature set. When Kiki formally launches, a free tier will remain. We’ll always give clear notice before any changes, and you’ll only be charged if you choose to subscribe. If you don’t opt in, your account will move to the free tier automatically, with no action needed from you.
No. Kiki is designed to be easy to use. If anything doesn’t feel clear, your feedback helps us make Kiki better for everyone.
Once you’re onboarded and connected to your chosen email account and calendar, Kiki checks for school and club emails that you’ve approved. It then pulls out key information, like dates, updates and actions, to create concise summaries and one-tap calendar entries available to the whole family. You can sync Kiki with your preferred calendar so everything stays up to date and you only need to check Kiki when you want to.
Kiki is designed to catch as much as possible, but it won’t always get everything right. Occasionally, information may be missed due to unusual formats, corrupted files, or the wide variety of ways schools and clubs communicate. We test Kiki against a broad range of real communications and closely monitor how it performs, but we can’t guarantee perfect results. What we can promise is that we’re continuously improving accuracy and paying close attention to where things don’t work as expected.
Kiki looks for specific types of information in school and club communications, such as dates, times, and actions, and uses this to create summaries and suggested events. These are intended to help you stay organised and when in doubt, you should always check it against the original message.
New emails usually appear in Kiki shortly after they arrive. They may take a little longer to finish processing and appear in your Feed, depending on how busy the system is. While this is happening, Kiki clearly shows when something is still being processed.
Kiki currently only supports Gmail and Google Calendar.
We’re working on adding support for Microsoft email and calendar services, including Outlook, Hotmail, and MSN. Support for Apple email accounts such as iCloud, me.com, and mac.com, as well as other providers like Yahoo, is planned for later.
Yes. You can manage your email and calendar settings from your profile and turn syncing on or off at any time. If you turn email syncing off, new emails will no longer appear in Kiki unless another adult in your family has their account connected and receives emails from approved senders.
Yes. Kiki is linked to your account, so as long as you sign in with the same email address, you can access your Kiki account on multiple devices.
Yes. You have full control on what emails Kiki can process. We will only ever process emails that come from senders that you have approved as a family and only from connected email accounts.
At the moment, Kiki works with text based content only, processing email body text and PDF attachments. Support for additional document formats, such as Word and PowerPoint files, as well as image content, is planned.
Kiki currently only works with email communications. We plan to add SMS support and user uploaded content.
We also plan to explore app integrations in the future, but the wide range of school and club apps means this needs careful planning. From our research, most apps also send the same information by email, although you may need to enable this in the app’s settings.
If your school uses ParentMail, ensure that ParentMail is set to send emails to the address you connect to Kiki. You may need to adjust your notification settings in your Account in ParentMail so messages are sent by email as well as in-app notifications.
Yes. Kiki is designed for shared care and allows information to be shared with other parents or carers. During the pilot, there will be no caps on the number of people you can invite.
At the moment, each Kiki account can connect to one email inbox and one calendar per user account. This must be the account you sign in with.
Support for connecting multiple email accounts and calendars is planned. In the meantime, additional email addresses can be added by inviting them as family members.
Currently, Kiki supports one family per account. Joining a different family requires deleting your existing account first. We plan to support multiple families ahead of full launch.
Kiki is only available to users aged 18 and over. This is due to data protection, legal and security requirements. We plan to explore support for teenagers in the future.
Yes. Kiki is built to comply with UK GDPR and recognised data protection best practices. We have data processing agreements in place with all approved subprocessors, including the required contractual safeguards for both UK and EU users.
Kiki only accesses the data needed to provide the service, such as school and club communications from connected email accounts. You can read our Privacy Policy for more details.
No. Kiki only processes the content and attachments of emails you explicitly approve. You decide which emails can be included and can block specific senders at any time. Blocked senders are always excluded, even if they’re currently in your approved list. All other emails are ignored.
No. Email approvals and blocked addresses are managed at the family level to minimise setup and ensure nothing gets missed. If one family member approves a sender, Kiki will process emails from that sender across all connected inboxes for the family. Likewise, if a sender is blocked by one family member, emails from that sender are blocked across all connected inboxes. You can turn off email syncing for your own account at any time if you no longer want Kiki to process emails from that inbox.
Your data is encrypted, and access is restricted to authorised systems and personnel only. Kiki is built using privacy by design principles. We have been Cyber Essentials certified since 2023, the UK government standard for organisations handling sensitive data, and we are working towards ISO 27001 accreditation.
Data is stored securely in the EU using reputable infrastructure providers, following UK data protection requirements.
Yes. Kiki uses AI for specific parts of the process, such as analysing emails and attachments to create summaries, extract dates and identify key information. We use a number of safeguards throughout our processing pipeline to ensure accuracy, consistency, data security, and privacy. Where AI isn’t needed, we don’t use it and keep as much processing as possible within our own systems.
Users do not interact directly with AI in Kiki. AI is used in the background to help analyse information and create summaries.
No. Your data is not used to train public or third party AI models. When we use data for testing or improvement, it is anonymised and, where possible, based on public or synthetic data. In rare cases, such as investigating a bug or edge case you’ve reported, we may ask for your permission to use a specific example to help improve Kiki’s accuracy.
Kiki works automatically and doesn’t rely on humans reading your messages as part of normal operations.
Protecting your data is a core part of how Kiki is designed. We have the appropriate legal arrangements in place to meet UK and EU GDPR and data protection legislation. Where AI services are used, we prioritise providers that support zero data retention and EU based processing wherever possible. Data sent for processing is used only to generate a response and is not stored or reused by those providers.
Before sending any data to third party AI providers, we remove personal identifiers wherever we can. Requests are made by Kiki, not by you as an individual, so your identity is not shared. We also deliberately avoid using AI providers where data protection policies are not sufficiently clear or actionable.
Kiki isn’t perfect and occasional mistakes can happen. That’s why we always include the original communication alongside anything we summarise, so you can quickly check if something doesn’t seem quite right. We test Kiki against a wide range of real school and club communications and monitor how it performs, but we can’t guarantee perfection.
If in doubt, you should always refer back to the original message.
Like any automated system, Kiki has limitations. It can sometimes struggle with unusual or complex document formats, ambiguous wording or school specific terminology. While Kiki is designed for school and club communications, it won’t always interpret context perfectly. That’s why we always show the original message alongside summaries so you can check anything that doesn’t look quite right. We continue to improve Kiki based on real world performance and feedback from families.
Kiki reflects the information provided in the original email or attachment. If a school or club has made an error, such as an incorrect date, time or detail, that same error will appear in Kiki’s summary. When an updated message is sent, Kiki will try to match it to the original event and reflect the change. However, if the update is worded differently, it may not always be matched correctly. This is why the original message is always included, so you can double check anything that seems unusual or unexpected.
If the summary doesn’t reflect what you expect to see, you should review the original message, which is easy to access by tapping View original on any event or information card. The original should always be treated as definitive.
There can be a short delay between an email arriving in your inbox and it appearing fully processed in Kiki. This can depend on email provider settings and the time needed to process the message. Kiki clearly shows when something is still being processed.
Kiki automatically tries to remove duplicates, but if two messages differ slightly, they may be treated as separate items, for example if they’re sent to different people or resent by the school with updates. This can sometimes result in what looks like duplicate emails, summaries or events.
If something doesn’t look right, here are a few things to check:
If none of these steps resolve the issue, please let us know via the bug reporting channel in our WhatsApp Community, or flag the issue in app using “Send us feedback” option in the Settings menu so we can investigate. Missing or incomplete information can sometimes happen due to formatting or processing delays, and reporting these cases helps us improve performance over time.
We’re always open to ideas for new features and improvements. As a small team, we may not be able to implement every suggestion or respond to every message straight away, but we do read all feedback and use it to help shape what we build next.
You can share ideas using the Send us feedback option in the Settings menu. For quicker interaction, you can also join our WhatsApp Community, where there’s space to suggest features, ask questions and share feedback.
You can report issues, comments and feedback either using the “Send us feedback” option in the Settings menu. For more rapid feedback, you can also join our WhatsApp Community. We have a dedicated bugs channel and other channels to provide general feedback and ask questions.
The following details are really helpful when reporting an issue:
Kiki is in development, and we’d love your input to create the best app for parents and carers. Sign up for our monthly newsletter to stay updated and receive promotional offers when we launch.
Want to shape Kiki’s future? Join as a beta tester to get early access and share your feedback. You can update your preferences or unsubscribe anytime.
