Tools: Contacts

Once a CardDAV account is connected, the assistant can read your address books and answer questions in chat — “What’s Maria Schmidt’s email address?”, “Find all contacts at Muster GmbH”, “What phone number do I have saved for …?”. These tools appear only once an account is connected → Connect calendars and contacts.

Contacts use the same DAV account as the calendar tools — one sign-in provides both services, as long as the server exposes address books.

Tool	Purpose	Type	Available
List address books (contact_list_addressbooks)	Lists all address books across all of the person’s connected CardDAV accounts. Called first to obtain an addressBookId.	Read	when connected
Search contacts (contact_search_contacts)	Searches contacts by name, organization or email across all address books (query). An empty query returns all contacts — capped at 50.	Read	when connected
Contact details (contact_get_contact)	Full detail view of a single contact by addressBookId + contactId.	Read	when connected

Example prompts

• “What’s Maria Schmidt’s email address?”
• “Find all contacts at Muster GmbH.”
• “What phone number do I have saved for Mr Müller?”
• “Which address book holds the contact for …?”

Good to know

• Provider-transparent: the assistant always targets an addressBookId, never “CardDAV”. Multiple accounts and multiple address books work at the same time; the model chooses based on the address-book list.
• PII: NOT exempt (a deliberate difference from calendar): contacts are third-party data and run through the normal PII masking / pseudonymization by default — unlike calendar reads, which run unmasked as first-party data. Admins can, if needed, exempt a dedicated configured contacts tool from masking (the “Redact contact data” checkbox).
• Transparency: contact calls appear in the activity / transparency sidebar with their source (which address book) — like any other tool call.
• Multiple address books: one account can have several address books; search fans out across all of them automatically.

Limits

• Licence (Pro/Site): The contact tools are available in Pro and Site (not Free) — the same Pro-gated DAV connection as the calendar tools. → License & edition model
• CardDAV only: tested with iCloud, Nextcloud, mailbox.org and self-hosted servers (Radicale, Baïkal, SOGo). Microsoft 365 provides no contacts (no Graph path), and Google is not supported.
• Read-only — no creating, editing or deleting of contacts.
• No background sync, no caching — every query is a live, on-demand request.
• Not carried over: photos, groups and structured postal addresses are deliberately omitted.

Distinction: These are the assistant’s built-in contact tools. Connecting, testing and disconnecting an account is covered in a dedicated article → Connect calendars and contacts.