Ori
The assistant that gets you back online.
Every other support assistant in this category has the same design flaw. It needs the internet to explain to you why you have no internet.
The moment this is built for
You have landed. The plane door opened twelve minutes ago. Your phone says No Service, or it says the carrier name but nothing loads. There is a queue at passport control, no wifi you trust, and a person waiting for you at an address you cannot look up.
This is the exact moment that every support chat in this industry stops working. The widget needs to load. The bot needs to reach a model. The help centre is a website. All of them are on the other side of the connection you do not have, so the advice arrives after the problem has solved itself or after you have paid a carrier $12 a day out of desperation.
Ori was built backwards from that moment. Before any model writes a word, the app shows the one thing that works with the radio off: the steps that fix most lines, saved on the phone.
The help centre first, the model second
Layer one is retrieval, and it does the work. Every article in the help centre is indexed, and Ori finds the ones that match your question before anything is written. On orbislo.com the index loads with the chat page, so a chat you already have open keeps answering from it if your connection drops. In the app, a question asked with no signal gets the reconnect steps saved on the phone, and the question waits for one tap to send it again.
Layer two is the model, and it is the polish. When the network is reachable, the model takes the article the index found, plus your account state and your device diagnostics, and writes an answer fitted to your situation rather than making you read a general article and work out which half applies to you. It also handles the questions the index cannot phrase match, the ones where you describe a symptom rather than name a feature.
The order matters and it is the opposite of how these things are usually built. Retrieval first, model second. Most assistants put a model in front and treat retrieval as a source it may consult, which means no model, no answer. Here the answer exists before the model does. The model improves the wording. It is not load bearing.
3 steps
Saved on your phone to get most lines back online
1 tap
To send your question again once you are back online
100 MB
Free rescue data a month, if you need to get back online
With no signal, and with a connection
| No signal | Connected | |
|---|---|---|
| Steps to get your line back online | Yes, saved on your phone | Yes |
| Your balance | As of the last sync, with the time | Live |
| Your question | Kept, one tap to send again | Answered |
| An answer written for your exact situation | No | Yes |
| Buy or top up data | No | Yes |
| Refunds and account changes | No | Handed to a person |
The free 100 MB of Lifeline data that Orbislo customers get each month in 197 destinations is often all it takes to move from the first column to the second.
The guardrail, written down
There are three categories of fact Ori is not permitted to generate, because being wrong about them costs you money or strands you.
- Prices. Every figure Ori shows is read from the live catalogue, the same source as the pricing page. It cannot estimate, round or infer a price, and it will not tell you what something probably costs.
- Coverage and speed. Speed figures come from the same coverage pages you can read yourself.
- Refund outcomes. Ori can tell you the refund policy and it can open the case. It cannot tell you that you will be refunded. A person decides that, and a bot promising a refund it cannot authorise is the fastest way to turn one annoyed customer into two.
When it does not have the fact, it says so in one sentence and offers the handover. It does not produce a confident paragraph shaped like an answer, which is the failure mode people have learned to expect and the reason most of them skip the bot entirely.
The handover to a person
Support replies by email, usually within a few hours. What helps is that the person opening your message already has the diagnostics attached: the handset, the operating system version, the profile state, the last network attached, the last three error codes and your balance.
That removes the eight message opening exchange where somebody asks you what phone you have and whether you have tried turning it off and on again, while you are standing in an arrivals hall with 4 percent battery. The first reply you get is about your actual problem.