Why our family got the first Sathi
For years before any of this had a name, there was a chat thread with exactly one participant. Notes to self: contact names, half-decisions, reminders about meetings choreographed in two languages, the floor plan of a family house an ocean away. That thread was the real predecessor of Sathi — and its real competitor. It held a life, badly: no memory beyond scrolling, no understanding, owned end to end by an advertising company.
The household around that thread lives in four languages daily — Nepali, English, Japanese, Hindi — not as a feature matrix but as breakfast conversation. The grandparents are not an "accessibility persona"; they are users with opinions. Any assistant worth building here would have to hold all of that: the languages, the generations, the documents from three bureaucracies, the recipes nobody wrote down.
The decision
So the first deployment went to the people who could hurt us most by being ignored: ourselves. The builder first, then the family, then — when it is earned — relatives, then communities, then anyone. Each ring opens on one gate only: Sathi must be genuinely more trustworthy than the incumbents for the people in that ring. Not more clever. More trustworthy.
This ordering is not humility theater; it changes what gets built. When your mother's 6 a.m. hospital-day alarm is the exit test, "the alarm rings" stops being a feature and becomes a promise with a face on it. When dinner conversation is the bug tracker, friction gets fixed the same day or it gets repeated to you over rice. A demo can be polished; a household cannot.
Where that has gotten us, in honest tenses
Today the family's messaging and calls run on our own server — the incumbent apps lost that job months ago. The assistant drafts and prepares, and a human taps yes before anything executes. Everyone can leave: export is a sealed, signed archive; leaving issues a receipt; returning with the archive reactivates what the other side never revoked. The operator — one of us — can no longer read anyone's life by default; access is a revocable grant each member controls.
None of that is finished. The point of this blog is to write the decisions down while they are still cheap to reverse, and to let people outside the household argue with them. The gate stays what it was: the next ring opens when the people in it would genuinely be safer here than where they are.