It looks like they take a string as the parameter. Once you make the request, which returns nothing, you'll need to use checkPermission to determine if it was granted by the user or not. So I'm guessing anytime you would need to use one of the permissible functions you would need to check the permission first. Because if you did it once immediately after requesting it and tried to cache the answer, the user may not have had time to respond to the dialog yet before the answer is checked.
That's just how I interpreted the help file. It also says this will only work on android.