Sorinai just got eyes

Until now, Sorinai could hear your meeting and nothing else.

That was fine for most of it. Conversation is where the meeting lives, and Sorinai was listening to all of it. But a lot of calls have a second half that never gets said out loud — the spreadsheet you're both looking at, the CV open in the other window, the clause someone just pasted into chat, the exercise on the shared screen you're being asked to solve.

Sorinai was blind to all of it. You could ask about it, but only by typing out a description first, and nobody types a description of a table while someone waits on the other end of the line.

So we gave it eyes.

Ask about what you're looking at

While a call is running, Sorinai sits in a small window at the edge of your screen where you can ask it anything. There's now an eye beside the box you type into. When it's lit, whatever you ask goes with a picture of the screen you're looking at.

That's the whole feature. You stop describing things.

Point at a pricing table and ask which line they'll push back on. Have a CV open and ask what's missing from it. Get shown a dashboard for four seconds and ask what the number in the corner actually means. The answer comes back from what's on the screen, not from what you managed to summarise about it while someone was mid-sentence.

There's also a button — Quick Help — that answers without you typing anything at all. Press it and Sorinai works out where the conversation has got to, what's still hanging, and what you might say next. It now reads the screen alongside the room, so one press can solve the coding problem you were just handed, or explain the slide that went past too quickly, without a word from you.

It looks when you ask, not while you work

This is the part worth being precise about, because "it can see your screen" is a sentence that deserves some suspicion.

It takes one still picture, at the moment you press send. There's no video, no stream, and nothing running between your questions.

• Only when the eye is lit. It starts on if you've given Sorinai permission to see your screen, and one click turns it off. Off stays off.
• Only the screen you're on. The display your cursor is on — not your other monitors.
• Not Sorinai's own window. It leaves itself out of the picture, so it never ends up looking at itself.
• Not kept. The picture goes with that one question and is never saved. All that stays behind is a mark showing it could see when you asked.

It takes a picture when you ask it a question. It doesn't watch you work.

Every question that carried one is marked, so you can always look back and see exactly which answers it had your screen for. On a Mac, macOS will ask for permission to record your screen the first time. If you don't give it, the eye stays dark and everything else works as before.

It also knows what you do

The other half of this release is smaller to describe and changes more than you'd expect.

You can now tell Sorinai two things about yourself: what your work is, and a couple of lines about it. A recruiter, a founder, an account executive, a consultant, a student in lectures — same product, completely different meetings.

Sorinai used to know your name and your email. Now it can know that your calls are mostly renewals with existing customers, or first-round screens against a specific brief, or discovery with people who don't yet know what they need.

That changes what comes out the other end. The same hour of talking gets written up differently depending on who was in the room taking it — what counts as the important part, and which unanswered thing is worth flagging. It reaches the answers you get during the call, the notes you're left with, the template it fills in, and the follow-up email.

It takes a minute, and it's probably the best minute you'll spend on any of this.

Both live now

The eye is there in your next call, once you're on the latest version. The two lines about your work are in Settings whenever you get to them.

Two different features, but they're the same idea: the less you have to explain your own context, the more of the meeting you get to keep for the meeting.