Make It Smarter

By the end of this page, your morning briefing will include actual weather, calendar events, and email data.

Time: ~20 minutes

What skills do

Skills extend your agent's capabilities. A skill gives your agent a new tool it can call — like fetching weather data, reading your calendar, or searching the web.

OpenClaw ships with built-in skills for the most common needs. Community skills are available on ClawHub.

Add the web search skill

The simplest way to get weather is the built-in web search skill. Add it to your config:

{
  "skills": {
    "web_search": {
      "enabled": true
    }
  }
}

Now update your briefing prompt to tell the agent to use it:

"prompt": "Give me a morning briefing. Use web search to get current weather in [your city]. Include: today's date, weather (current temp + forecast for today), my calendar events, top emails. 6-8 lines, no bullet points."

Restart the Gateway and run the test:

openclaw gateway restart && openclaw cron run morning-briefing

You should now get real weather data.

Add Google Calendar

To include real calendar events, you need the Google Calendar skill.

1. Enable the skill in config:

{
  "skills": {
    "google_calendar": {
      "enabled": true,
      "calendarId": "primary"
    }
  }
}

2. Authenticate:

openclaw skills auth google_calendar

This opens a browser window for Google OAuth. Authorize it. The token is saved locally — OpenClaw never stores it on any external server.

3. Update the prompt:

"prompt": "Morning briefing. Get today's calendar events from Google Calendar. Get current weather in [your city] via web search. List events in order with times. Mention any gaps longer than 2 hours. Keep it to 8 lines."

Add Gmail

Same pattern as Calendar:

{
  "skills": {
    "gmail": {
      "enabled": true,
      "maxEmails": 10
    }
  }
}

openclaw skills auth gmail

Update the prompt:

"prompt": "Morning briefing. Fetch today's calendar (Google Calendar). Fetch unread emails from the last 12 hours (Gmail). Summarize: date, weather, events, emails that need action. 10 lines max."

Control costs

Each skill call adds tokens. A morning briefing that fetches weather + calendar + 10 emails might use 1,000-2,000 tokens per run. At typical API prices, that's under $0.01/day.

To keep it lean:

• Set "maxEmails": 5 instead of 10
• Keep the prompt under 100 words
• Use "model": "claude-haiku-4-5-20251001" for briefings — Haiku is fast and cheap for structured output tasks

{
  "automations": [
    {
      "id": "morning-briefing",
      "schedule": "0 7 * * 1-5",
      "model": "claude-haiku-4-5-20251001",
      "prompt": "...",
      "channel": "telegram"
    }
  ]
}

Goal complete

Your daily briefing goal is done. Every morning, without opening your laptop, you'll receive a summary of your day.

From here you can:

• Add more automations — evening review, weekly summary, whatever cadence fits you
• Read the next goal if you want to go further
• Jump to Level Up if you want to understand the memory system, skills in depth, or deployment