An assistant I am building into my own phone, a Motorola Razr. A phone that stays out of the way until I choose to open it, with a small character inside that clears the rest away.
The whole reason I started Nia is that I constantly felt my attention being sucked away on the iPhone. I also had a certain nostalgia for the old flip phones. Wouldn't it be better to be less distracted?
So the phone has two states. Closed, I see only the most important things. If I decide to open it, I'm making a conscious choice to enter the phone's world. Inside that world, Nia strips away distractions too.
It is also a little bit cute, with something of a phone pet about it. I wanted to experiment with personality in software. It is a rare thing these days.
Three beliefs came out of that.
People, not ad revenue. The phone works for the person holding it. Nothing in it exists to be looked at more: no feed, no count to clear, no reason to open it without a task.
Open the phone to act, not to be acted upon. Closed is the normal state, not a lesser one. Closed is review and voice. Open is a choice. Propped on a desk, it is a clock and Nia's room.
Keep the joy. Calm is not grey. A character who fishes, a chip-tune ringtone, a camera that makes accidental art. The devices of 2001 had personality, and then they left you alone.
Dark, cool greys, and one green. The ground is near-black, not black: pure black read as a hole in this screen.
The green is kept for one meaning. If something on screen is green, it is happening right now. On a normal morning no surface has any green on it at all, and that absence is why it works.
Even Nia's own work is not green. Thinking is grey.
Ground to words
#3FDB5F is live, and only live. Listening, a timer running, a song playing, a meeting starting, charging. Never important, never selected, never branding. Paused, it goes grey.
Two typefaces, strictly divided. Space Grotesk for anything a person said or would say. Space Mono for what the machine knows: labels, counters, durations.
Size follows distance, not importance. The clock is as big as the space allows because it is read from across a desk.
Space Grotesk · human information
Thursday, Sep 17
12:28
Names, words, the date, what someone said. Light, only for big numerals read from across a desk.
Space Mono · machine state
WORK
PEOPLE
00:42 LEFT
Section labels in capitals, counters, durations. Never on anything read from a metre away; it was unreadable there.
Nia is a pixel art character: black and white, with the live green, and the pose is the phone's state. Listening, thinking, music, asleep, charging. Never a mood made up for effect.
Nia reacts and never asks. A tap wakes Nia up. Play music and Nia sways. Nia never wants attention, never sulks and never keeps score.
Propped on a desk, the phone can show Nia on a pier at night. Tap the water to fish. A catch rises, shows its name and fades. No card, no count, no buzz.
The rim: a line round the screen
I wanted my phone to stay closed on my desk while I'm at work, and still be in touch with what needs my attention. It takes the idea one step further: with the phone shut, I'm not distracted by opening, say, Twitter.
So the Mac has a page of Nia, laid out the way Mail and Notes are: the chat, my texts, notes, to-dos and the calendar in one window.
The phone is still the only place anything lives. Each click on the page is a request to the phone, and the phone does it as if I had touched it, with the same rules. A text still waits for my yes; a calendar change still has its Undo.
The same system holds. Dark greys, the two voices, and green only for what is live: the timer counting down, the song playing, a meeting about to start. On a quiet afternoon the page has no green at all.
Shown with made-up demo data.
Every finding goes into one notebook, measured on the phone and never assumed. It is past 7,700 lines. These eight changed how the whole thing is built.
The pattern is the same each time. The obvious approach reported success, and nothing happened.
Everything Nia can do has one written form, a short slash command. Whatever I say is read into these, one or several, and shown back as “what Nia understood”, so I can check it.
A language model may only speak this language. Its answer is held to a grammar, so it cannot write a command Nia does not have, and every word in it must be one I actually said. Then the parser reads it, as if I had typed it.
A made-up action cannot run. It can only fail to parse.
What I say · what Nia understood
set a timer for twelve minutes for the rice
/timer 12m ricethe timer I just set, add five minutes
/timer +5m ricewake me at 7:30 on weekdays
/alarm 7:30 weekdayswhat's the weather tomorrow in Toronto
/weather tomorrow in “Toronto”remind me to call the dentist tomorrow at 10
/remind “Call the dentist” 2026-10-04 10:00every weekday at 7 play the radio
/auto every weekdays 7:00 do “play 2004 FM”Before building anything: what is the simplest thing that could work, and is it enough? Climb only when the rung below is shown to fail.
The launcher was rung four, built when rungs one and two were enough. It was reverted to stock plus widgets, which is where it should have started.
These are product decisions, not preferences. Each one was argued once and is not argued again by accident. Some are enforced in code, so breaking one breaks the build.
When designing and iterating, we wanted to be sure we were looking at what was actually live, not just supposedly live. A change counts once it is seen working on the phone.
Screenshot it. Read the stored value back. Check the log.
Next project
Mohawk College