ZEP Pulse consists of two parts: a desktop app on your computer and a view in ZEP. The app records which applications you work with. From this, ZEP suggests project times that you review and accept with one click.

Whether ZEP Pulse is available in your company is decided by a switch in the administration. It is off to begin with. See the section Administration and switching off.

The desktop app measures every second which window is in the foreground and keeps a list of your work segments from this. That list first stays on your computer.

Only when you choose Send to ZEP does the app transfer the selected day. ZEP compares the segments with your bookings from the past four weeks and derives suggestions from them: which segment fits which project and task. The suggestions appear in ZEP next to your project time calendar.

Nothing is booked automatically. Every suggestion waits for you to accept, edit or discard it.

The app is available for Windows and macOS. On Windows it installs for your user account, administrator rights are not required. You download the app from the ZEP website and choose the version for your device there: Windows or macOS, for macOS separately for Apple chip and Intel processor.

The app updates itself. Closing the window does not quit it, it keeps running in the notification area of the taskbar.

For each work segment, the app records the name of the application, the window title, start and end as well as an automatically assigned category. The categories are named in English (browser, ide, communication, productivity, entertainment, system, other) and do not appear as text in the main window but as the colour of the segment.

ZEP Pulse does not read keyboard input or the contents of the clipboard. At the Detailed level, ZEP Pulse derives keywords from the screen content on your computer. These include file names with extensions, ticket identifiers, document titles, parts of web addresses and names of people visible in the window. The app stores these keywords and transfers them with the day to ZEP. The fully recognised text does not leave your computer.

The level Basic stays with application name, window title and duration. The level Detailed additionally takes one capture of the active window per minute, reads the visible text and derives a short activity description from it on your computer. The capture itself and the recognised text do not leave your computer.

If you do not type or move anything for 20 minutes, the app closes the current segment. If a full-screen window is running, for example a video conference or a presentation, one hour applies. If you lock the screen or the computer goes to sleep, the segment ends immediately. Sign-in screen, start menu and similar system windows do not count as work.

In ZEP you open ZEP Pulse via the icon in the right bar of Project Times. The view shows the selected day with all suggestions.

Every suggestion names project, task, period and a short reason. In addition there is an assessment of how certain the assignment is: High, Medium, Low or Needs Clarification. Via Show activity you see which applications and windows the suggestion is based on.

For each suggestion you have three options:

If a segment cannot be assigned unambiguously, ZEP asks a question and offers several projects to choose from. If several suggestions are rated High, you accept them together via the Capture high confidence entries button in the header, which also states the number.

Via the icon in the notification area of the taskbar you can also pause and resume recording. The entries of this menu are labelled in English.

ZEP Pulse strictly separates what stays on your computer from what you send to ZEP. The following sections describe both, as well as the periods after which ZEP deletes the transferred data again.

The recorded segments are stored in a database in your user folder. Screen captures from the Detailed level are only stored as a reduced preview image and automatically deleted after 24 hours, the high-resolution image for text recognition exists exclusively in memory. The recognised text itself is not stored, only the keywords derived from it. This evaluation happens entirely on your computer.

The recording does not run along to ZEP in the background. You send a day yourself via Send to ZEP. Beyond that, ZEP can request the transfer of a day when you open the suggestions in ZEP. What is transferred then:

Screen captures are not transferred.

Only you. There is no report and no view in ZEP through which supervisors or the department management could see your Pulse data. What becomes visible to others is only the result: the project time you have accepted. The change log records that it came from a suggestion.

For the suggestion, ZEP evaluates the summary of your day. It contains up to three window titles per segment, in shortened form. What comes back are exclusively project and task identifiers with a short reason, no names. The same rules apply as for the ZEP Assistant: processing in the EU and no training with your data. Details are in the article ZEP Assistant.

The data transferred to ZEP is deleted in stages. ZEP removes the detail data with the window titles and the minute breakdown after 30 days. After that, the summary of the day remains: the applications used with their shares, categories, totals, idle times and recording gaps. ZEP deletes this summary after twelve months. Both periods run from the day of the transfer, not from the recorded day.

For suggestions this means: they can only be generated for days whose detail data is still available. For older days, ZEP reports that no detail data is left.

The project times you have already accepted are not affected. They are ordinary bookings and are kept as long as the rest of your time data.

Via Sign out in the desktop app you delete the local data of this device: recorded entries, settings, ignore list and screen captures. This cannot be undone. Days already transferred to ZEP are not affected.

Under Administration > ZEP AI Features > ZEP Pulse, administrators control whether ZEP Pulse is available in the company. The page carries a single switch, and it is off to begin with. An administrator opens the page, ticks the box and saves. Anyone who already used ZEP Pulse keeps it without doing anything.

While the switch is off, the icon does not appear in the project times and the desktop app rejects the sign-in. The same page also carries the link your employees use to download the desktop app.