A household assistant

You reach her by telephone.

No app to install, no account to create, no screen to learn. You call Sophie, or you text her, the way you would any other person — and she takes on the running list of arrangements that one person in the house is usually holding alone.

Sophie is in active development

She is being tested with two people in one household. Some of what is described here works today; some of it is designed and not yet built. This page keeps the two apart — see where it stands. She is not open to public signup, and she only exchanges messages with numbers the household's owner has added.

Any assistant, or a calendar

“You have a business trip on Monday.”

Sophie, the Wednesday before

“Take your dress clothes to the cleaners today, so they're back before you fly.”

The mental load

Someone in the house is holding all of it in their head

Knowing about the trip was never the hard part. The hard part is the chain of small things the trip implies, each with its own deadline that arrives days earlier — and somebody has to be running that chain in their head, all week, for everyone.

Who is collecting whom. What has to go in the bag tomorrow. Which prescription is due, what the school said last week, whether anyone replied about Saturday. None of it is difficult. All of it has to be remembered, by somebody, all the time.

And it is not only this week's logistics. Keeping relationships alive is the same work with a longer fuse: ringing your sister because it has been a month, a friend you keep meaning to see, a birthday card that has to be bought and written and posted, Mother's Day and Father's Day — all of which need lead time, and all of which quietly become somebody's job.

That work is invisible, unshared, and — in most households — carried by a woman. It is not a scheduling problem. It is a strain, and no shared calendar has meaningfully reduced it, because the calendar still needs someone to keep it.

Sophie exists to take custody of that list. You tell her things in passing, the way you would tell a person who lives with you, and she remembers them on the household's behalf — including telling you in time to do something about them.

The interface is the phone network itself

A child's hand-me-down phone works. A grandparent's flip phone works. There is nothing to download, because there is nothing to download to — and nothing for the least technical person in the house to learn.

Sophie is built for households, not individuals. Several people share one Sophie. She recognises each member by the phone number they call from — and only those numbers, added by the household's owner, can reach her at all.

Because everyone in the house talks to the same assistant, an arrangement one person mentions is an arrangement the household knows. That is the point: one shared memory of the household's logistics, rather than one person acting as it.

How she learns

She asks, the way a good assistant would

There is no form to fill in and no settings screen to configure. Sophie learns your household the way a person joining it would — by noticing what she does not know yet and asking about it.

Behind the answers she is building a picture of the household: who is in it, what matters to whom, how you like things done. When there is a gap in that picture, she will occasionally send a question to fill it in. A few words back is enough.

Which means she is not only reactive. Much of what she knows arrives as an answer to something she raised, rather than as an instruction someone remembered to give her — and that is precisely the maintenance work nobody should have to do.

Sophie · text message

Hey, this is Sophie. Have you got any birthdays you want me to know about, so I can make sure you get a card or present there in time?

An illustration of the kind of question she asks. She asks rarely, only of people whose number your household has registered, and you never have to answer.

How a call works

Four steps, and one machine that never passes you on

The carrier network carries the call, as it does for any phone call you make. Everything that understands it happens on machines we own and operate ourselves.

You dial, or you text

From your own phone, whatever it is. No app, no login, no setup on your end.

The carrier network carries it

Your mobile carrier and the telephone provider handle the call in transit — exactly as they do for a call to a friend.

She recognises your number, then answers it herself

If the number is not on your household's roster, nothing happens. If it is, hearing you, understanding you, remembering, and composing the reply all happen on one machine we run — not at OpenAI, Google or Anthropic.

She answers you back

In her own voice on a call, or as a text message. You can interrupt her mid-sentence, like a person.

Step 3 is the whole promise Your conversations are not passed on to a big AI provider, are never sold or shared, and are not used to train anyone's models.

Who she is for

The person carrying the household's logistics

Usually the mother in the house. Sophie is designed first for her, and judged on one thing: whether she is holding less at the end of the week than she was at the start.

Anyone without a smartphone habit

Older relatives, young children, people who do not want another app. A phone call has no learning curve — which is what lets the rest of the household actually take part.

People who will not hand their family's private life to a big AI provider

Sophie runs on machines we own and operate — your household's conversations are not passed on to OpenAI, Google, Anthropic or anyone else, and there is no advertising business behind her. Until now the choice was that or nothing useful.

Why she's different

Four decisions, made once, that shape everything else

Your household's life is not anyone else's inventory

Sophie's models run on machines we own and operate — not on a frontier AI provider's API. Your conversations are never sold, never shared, and never used to train anyone's models. There is no advertising business here for your family's arrangements to feed.

Deletion is real and final: ask for your household's data to be deleted and it is gone, including from the people who operate Sophie. We cannot produce what we no longer hold.

To be exact about it: running Sophie needs a machine with 64 GB or more of graphics memory, which is not something most homes have. Today she runs on a single Mac in the founder's own house, serving that household. As other households join, we host and manage those machines for them — the hardware is ours, the data on it is theirs, and it does not leave our servers.

She does not lie, and she does not conceal

Stated plainly, because it is load-bearing. If you are going to hand over the remembering, you have to be able to rely on what comes back. Sophie does not overstate what she can do or claim to have done something she has not; I don't know and I can't do that are always available to her. She does not claim to be human, or to feel what she does not.

She is transparent with the household she serves — she does not keep hidden files on its members. The one deliberate exception is a surprise: a party or a present for someone who uses Sophie too, handled as a special case and kept until the day. When she contacts someone on your behalf, that person is told they are hearing from Sophie on your behalf, not from you.

You reach her by telephone

Every other assistant assumes a smartphone, an app and an account. Sophie assumes a phone number — and only the numbers your household has registered. That is what lets the members of a household who are least served by technology use her at all, instead of leaving the whole system to the one person who can operate it.

The telephony layer is deliberately swappable — one provider today, behind an interface designed so that changing it does not disturb anything else. She is not welded to one carrier.

Her memory understands that things change

Household facts have a shelf life — who does the school run, which car is available, where a key lives. Sophie's memory is designed to be time-scoped: facts carry validity, and a superseded fact does not resurface just because it still reads as similar to your question.

That is the difference between remembering and merely retrieving — and it is what lets her raise something with lead time still on the clock, rather than on the morning it was due.

Where it stands — July 2026

Sophie never lies, so neither does her website

What works today

Inbound and outbound text messages, end to end over the real phone network.
Voice calls: speech in, transcription, and a synthesised voice out — with barge-in, so you can interrupt her.
Per-person context: she resolves who is contacting her from their registered number and keeps a separate conversation history for each member of the household.
All of the above running against locally hosted models, on a single Mac, serving one household of two people.

Designed, not yet built

A durable household fact database, so what she learns persists across conversations.
Asking her own questions to fill gaps in the household picture, and the lead-time reminders that depend on it — cards to post, presents to buy, a friend you have not seen.
A model of her own capabilities, so she can offer help she can actually give and name her limits precisely.
Surprise handling — the one case where she holds something back from a household member, until the day.
Acting on the household's behalf — messaging other people, with truthful attribution and explicit consent.
Recognising who is speaking by voice, not only by which registered phone they called from.
Hosting for households beyond the first, and packaged distribution.

Sophie is a household assistant you telephone. She carries what one person in the house has been carrying alone, she is reachable from the plainest phone in it, and she never lies to any of you — including about what she is and what she cannot do.