Partech now has an AI Studio, and its first app is called Plain. It isn't finished. It isn't even in testing yet. I'd rather tell you that now than have you find out from a store listing.
Here is the idea. You get a letter from the council, the bank, the tax office or a landlord. It's two pages of careful, formal language. Somewhere in it is a thing you have to do and a date you have to do it by, and you can't quite tell whether it's urgent, routine, or a mistake. You photograph it. Plain tells you three things: what the letter is about, what you're being asked to do, and by when.
That's all it does.
Why letters
Most of what we read all day is written for us. Official letters aren't. They're written to protect the sender, to satisfy a rule, or to be correct in front of a regulator, and the reader comes a distant fourth. The result is language that's accurate and almost useless to the person who has to act on it.
The cost of misreading one is lopsided. Nobody is hurt when you skim a newsletter. Missing a date on a letter can cost you money, or a right you didn't know you had.
This is a job a language model can genuinely do well. It's also a job where a confident wrong answer is worse than no answer. Both of those things are why we picked it.
What we're promising, and what we're not
We're building Plain around a few rules, and we'll hold ourselves to them in public:
- It shows its working. Every answer points to the line of the letter it came from. If Plain says the deadline is the 14th, you can see the sentence that says so, and check.
- It's built to stay on your phone. Reading the page and explaining it should happen on your device. No account, and no letters uploaded to us. That's the goal we're designing toward, and we'll say plainly if any part of it changes.
- It says when to ask a person. Plain explains letters. It doesn't give legal, tax or financial advice, and for the letters that matter most it will tell you to take them to someone who can.
- It won't ship until it's dependable. More on that in a later post. We're going to test it on a lot of letters and measure how often it gets the deadline and the action right. If the number isn't good enough, we won't release it.
What Plain isn't
It isn't a chatbot you argue with about your tax affairs. It isn't a lawyer. It isn't going to write your appeal for you, at least not in version one. We'd rather do one small thing properly than five things approximately.
Where this goes
Plain is the first app in AI Studio. Partech also makes small games, calm reading apps and typefaces, and AI Studio has to be as honest and unflashy as those are. Small apps where the AI is the whole point. One job each. Done on your phone.
We'll write about Plain here as it's built, including the parts that don't work. If you'd like to follow along, the Plain page is the place to start.
