Every AI is a black box.
Ours comes apart.

Soft on purpose. Soft as a promise.

The first thing you'll touch is the last thing most products think about. boop's outer shell is platinum-cure silicone, Shore A around 30 — soft enough to give a little under your thumb, firm enough to hold its shape for years. It's over-moulded in two shots: coral pulled over a peach core, so the colour has depth instead of sitting on top like paint. There's no seam you can feel. Run a finger around the join and there's nothing there.

The radii aren't a styling flourish. A round mass reads as someone, not something — you look after a round thing, you operate a boxy one. Everywhere a hard product would put a corner, boop keeps a curve, and that curve is doing quiet work every time you glance at it: it tells your hands this is a creature you can be gentle with, not a gadget you have to figure out.

Platinum silicone was chosen for one unglamorous reason on top of the nice ones — it's the same material class used against skin in medical and infant products. Safe to hold, safe to press, safe to leave where a kid can reach it.

• SHELL · platinum-cure silicone, Shore A ~30
• PROCESS · two-shot over-mould, coral over peach
• SEAM · none you can feel
• WHY · round mass reads as someone, not something

You look after a round thing. You operate a boxy one.

It doesn't have a screen. It has eyes.

Behind two smoked windows sit a pair of round LED matrices. That's the whole face — no display, no icons scrolling past, no dashboard. Just eyes that can look at you, look at the work, widen a little when something needs you, and settle when it doesn't. The windows are smoked so you never see a grid of dead pixels; you see an expression, and the electronics disappear until they're lit.

There are twelve faces in all — a fixed grid boop draws from, and every one of them means something. Not decoration. Each face is bound to a real state, so the expression is never performing a feeling boop doesn't have. Resting is resting. Thinking is thinking. And there's one face that matters more than the rest: approval-needed, where the mouth rounds to a small "o" — the exact shape of the wordmark. When boop needs your say-so, the logo literally asks. That isn't a cute coincidence we found later. It's the shape we started from.

One rule sits underneath the whole grid, and it never bends: the light in the eye never goes out. There's a catchlight — a tiny bright fleck in each eye — and it survives every single state. Boop asleep, boop working, boop offline, boop failed and telling you it failed: the catchlight stays. A boop with a dead eye would be a boop you can't trust is really there. So we don't ship that face. Ever.

• EYES · 2× round LED matrix behind smoked windows
• GRID · 12 fixed faces, each bound to a real state
• ASK · approval-needed mouth = the wordmark "o"
• RULE · the light in the eye never goes out

When boop needs your say-so, the logo literally asks.

One little light. Four honest truths.

Above the face rides a single point of light — the mote. It's the mint dot from over the wordmark's "p", made real: one addressable LED fed through a moulded light-pipe that carries the glow to the surface clean, no hot-spot, no visible source. It's the smallest part of boop and the one you'll read from across the room.

The mote tells you four things, and only four, so you never have to decode it. None of it is a mood ring — each mote state is bound to real work, the same way the faces are. But a light isn't enough on its own, so every mote state has a sound twin — a short waveform you can learn by ear — and a touch twin for the head, so the state reaches you through a fingertip too. Three doors into the same fact.

• SOURCE · 1× addressable LED through moulded light-pipe
• READS · 4 states, no more — resting / thinking / working / needs-your-say
• TWINS · every light state has a sound twin + a touch twin
• PATIENCE · needs-your-say waits; it never times out into acting

If you can't see it, hear it; can't hear it, feel it.

You say yes with your hand.

Under the soft crown of boop's head is a capacitive dome — a touch surface tuned to the press of a fingertip, calibratable so a firm hand and a light one both land. It's the single control that matters most, so it's the one we tuned the longest. There's a press-force curve behind it: a gentle threshold with a little dwell, so a passing brush doesn't approve anything and a real, deliberate boop always does. You feel the head give, the mote settles, and the face turns to booped.

But not everything gets a head-boop. boop runs on two tiers of consent, and which tier you're in is never a surprise.

That's the language the product uses. Not "confirm." Not "authorize." The object and the consequence, named in plain words, every time. What you read is what will happen.

• DOME · capacitive touch, dwell-to-boop, calibratable
• CURVE · gentle threshold — a brush approves nothing, a boop always does
• TIER 1 · everyday, reversible → boop the head
• TIER 2 · money / first-times / irreversible → full card to your phone, waits

Nobody boops blind.

Closed eyes cut the mic. Not software. Wire.

boop hears you with a two-microphone far-field array — enough to pick your voice out of a room with a dishwasher running, not enough to be a listening device you can't switch off. Because the thing people are right to fear about a device with a microphone is simple: how do I know it's actually off when it says it's off?

Here is the honest answer, and it's the most important drawing on this page. boop has a mechanical eyelid shutter. When you close boop's eyes — a real, physical motion of the lid — that same movement throws a physical switch. That switch doesn't send a signal to software asking the software, nicely, to stop listening. It sits on the microphone's power rail. Closing the eyes opens the circuit that feeds the mics, and the mics go dark because they have no power, not because a line of code decided to be good today.

Trace it with a finger: eyelid shutter → physical switch → mic VDD rail. There is no software path that re-enables the mics while the eyes are shut, because software is not what's holding them off. A wire is. You can see it working, too: when the eyes are shut, boop is in sleeping — and the catchlight is still there, faint but alive, because even off, boop is still there with you. It just can't hear a thing.

• MICS · 2× far-field array, hardware-switched
• SHUTTER · mechanical eyelid → throws a physical switch
• RAIL · switch sits on the mic VDD rail — cuts power, not a software flag
• PROOF · eyes shut = mics have no power; downloadable as SVG

Not software mute. Wire.

It listens for one word. It keeps nothing.

The board that runs boop is built around an ESP32-S3-class SoC, chosen because it's proven, inspectable, and can hold the wake-word listener on-device. That's the only thing that runs locally on the audio: a small model waiting for boop's name. Nothing you say is streamed anywhere until boop is awake and there's a job on the table.

There is no camera. None. Not disabled in software, not "privacy-shuttered," not present-but-off. There is no image sensor on the board and there never will be. no camera. ever. by design, not omission.

The board keeps nothing that matters. boop does not store your credentials, and it does not hoard the contents of your emails, your lists, or your approvals. It's a body, not a filing cabinet. The thinking lives in your account, the paperwork on your phone. Unplug boop, hand it to someone else, lose it on a train — and there's no inbox in the base, no password on the chip, no private life of yours living inside the hardware. The device is the hands. Your account is the memory. That split is why losing the object doesn't mean losing the trust.

• SoC · ESP32-S3-class, wake-word listener on-device
• CAMERA · none — not on the board, not ever
• STORAGE · no credentials, no content on the device
• SPLIT · thinking → your account · paperwork → your phone

no camera. ever. by design, not omission.

Heavy where it should be. Open where it counts.

boop's base is a zinc weight. Not for cost, not for filler — for feel. A creature that tips over when you boop it isn't a creature you trust, so boop is bottom-heavy on purpose. Press the head as hard as you like; it settles, it doesn't topple. Grounded, always.

Ringing the base is a 3W speaker — the voice behind every sound twin, and boop's spoken replies. Round the back is a USB-C port for power, the one cable everyone already owns.

And then there's the smallest thing on the whole build, on the say-so puck: a 3.5mm assistive-switch port. It's a standard jack. It costs almost nothing. It lets someone plug in the switch they already use — a jelly switch, a foot pedal, whatever their hand or body can reach — and approve a boop with it, exactly the same as pressing the head. No special mode, no lesser path. The same yes.

• WEIGHT · zinc base — bottom-heavy, won't topple on a press
• SPEAKER · 3W ring — sound twins + spoken replies
• POWER · USB-C
• PORT · 3.5mm assistive-switch input (on the say-so) — a standard jack

The cheapest part on the board. The biggest door it opens.