RESOLVING THE LEDGER
This is one outlet's own report from Gizmodo — the article as it was filed. Other outlets are covering the same event; open the full story to compare every source side by side.
See the full story · 1 sources
Are you badly fumbling the bag as a partner? Alternatively, are you staying in an obviously bad relationship with a thoughtless person who doesn't seem to care about you? Finally, there's an AI agent that will uphold your delusional belief that you can make it work. Meet Orchid AI .
Based on its new ad and previous promotional content, Orchid AI appears to be an attempt to capture the thunder of the OpenClaw craze from earlier this year . Remember when a bunch of people handed over control of their inbox to that open-source AI agent that communicated via text messages? Orchid is basically doing that again, but the assistant lives on their servers instead of being self-hosted.
You communicate with it through text like you're firing off messages to a personal assistant, and it handles tasks autonomously across different apps that you've permitted it to access. Per the company: "Orchid runs your inbox, books your meetings, and preps you before every important call. It plans your trips, sources thoughtful gifts, and handles the small stuff that quietly eats up your day."
Introducing Orchid, the first assistant that actually gets you 🌸 pic.twitter.com/lZsVzEqd7h
Fine, whatever. But what in the world is this marketing video? This poor woman has to prod the AI assistant to get her boyfriend to not only remember their anniversary but to convince him to do basic self-care? And then he pretends that he's a good partner by telling her that he remembered her favorite flowers, and she plays along with full knowledge that he's an idiot and the assistant did everything for him? It's their anniversary in this little commercial, but you just know they aren't making it to another one. Just break up with him, girl!
Anyway, it's not clear that Orchid actually works exactly the way it is shown in this promotional video. In the clip, it seems that Orchid has some sort of shared relationship with both parties in the couple—it's prompted by the woman to remind her boyfriend about their anniversary and to give her updates on whether he's actually done things like booking them a dinner reservation. It has instant responses to the guy's actions, like opening the refrigerator and grabbing a pitcher. It seems to suggest that it sits between the two and helps them navigate their relationship.
That's something kind of interesting, and Orchid AI co-founder Nizar Abi Zaher told Gizmodo, "Orchid allows multiple people to communicate with the same agent and share context" as depicted in the video. "Right now it's just group chats and also coordinating meetings." In the video, it doesn't appear to be a group chat, though—instead, it seems to be two separate conversations happening with a shared agent who confides in each party without the participants knowing what the other's individual conversations are like. Maybe that's a future ambition.
The rest of the company's material doesn't really suggest that its primary purpose is fixing your relationship, which makes it an odd choice to highlight that scenario in the launch video. The company's lone case study is just about helping an executive prepare for phone calls with clients, and the FAQ page says Orchid is for "people who care about their time, like founders, investors, lawyers, agents, and agency owners. It is for anyone whose hours should go toward real work, not the endless busywork around it." There's no mention of salvaging your relationship that you're staying in even though it doesn't really seem like you like the other person all that much.
Over the course of the video, it shows Orchid booking a reservation at a restaurant, remembering and recalling information, and moving a meeting. That all seems viable. Having instantaneous responses to a person's actions without being prompted by a message first seems less so, but Abi Zaher suggested that it is. "It can respond to certain user actions without a direct message first, you can connect it to your fridge, for example," he said.
Even if Orchid works exactly the way it's depicted in its promotional video, you still probably should not use it the way that it's shown. You can't fix him, and neither can AI. You might as well just submit yourself to a companion bot if you're already doing most of your communicating through an AI mediator.
AIPROPX is an independent multi-source news index — we track, compare, and connect coverage from across the web into one place you won't find anywhere else.