Nora

Our phone and email assistant. She answers calls, makes outbound calls, checks calendars and remembers her own past actions. Built at the ananda lab, in daily use for the collective.

Bright workstation with a phone, a headset and a calendar view on the monitor

What she does

Answers incoming calls and summarizes them for the collective.
Makes calls herself: confirms appointments, books tables, follows up.
Checks calendar slots before committing. Live, not from a copy.
Writes and answers emails from her own mailbox.
Remembers her own past actions: every call and every email ends up in a searchable log.

Inquiries through this website also land with Nora first. She sorts what comes in, and the collective answers in person.

How she is built

Nora runs on our own infrastructure: a language model for conversation and text, a telephony connection for real calls, a direct line to the collective's calendars and her own memory of everything she has done. Not an off-the-shelf product, but assembled from building blocks we can swap out individually.

What was hard

Honest answer: not the talking. The remembering was hard. An assistant who booked a table yesterday has to know today that it was her, with whom and for when. That memory of her own past actions took more work than the telephony. And: drawing lines. Nora would rather say "I will check and get back to you" than commit to something wrong.

What she is not

Not a product you can buy. Nora works for us. What we learn while building her flows into our client projects: agent systems that actually hold up in production instead of only shining in the demo.

More from the workshop: How Nora learned to make phone calls in the logbook.