The bliq team
How bliq remembers you
The things you only said once are the things worth keeping. A look at what bliq stores, why it stores so little, and how to see and delete any of it.
The assistant that texts you first
An assistant that waits to be opened can only help with things you already remembered. That rules out almost everything that actually goes wrong.
The bliq team
bliq
Here is the flaw at the centre of every assistant that came before this one: to get help, you have to remember to ask.
Which means it can only ever help you with the things you already remembered. And the things you already remembered were never the problem.
The gap between knowing and noticing
You knew your flight was on Tuesday. You knew rent comes out on the 1st. You knew the dentist wanted a callback. None of that was missing information.
What was missing was somebody noticing, at the right moment, that the information had become urgent.
Nothing goes wrong because you did not know. It goes wrong because nobody told you when it started to matter.
That is a different job from answering questions, and it is the one we cared about. So bliq speaks first.
What earns a message
This is the hard part, and we got it wrong several times before we got it close.
An assistant with permission to message you is one bad decision away from being another app that buzzes. The moment you start ignoring it, it is dead — not annoying, dead, because you will swipe away the one message that mattered along with the forty that did not.
So a message has to clear a bar. In practice we look for three things at once:
- Something changed. Not something exists. Your flight moving is a change; your flight being on Tuesday is not.
- It changes what you would do. If knowing it earlier would not alter a single decision, it can wait until you ask.
- There is still time to act. Telling you at 07:40 that the flight moved is help. Telling you at 09:50 is commentary.
If a would-be message fails any one of those, it does not get sent. It just sits in the thread's context, ready for when you do ask.
Timing is most of it
The same sentence is useful or useless depending entirely on when it lands.
| The message | Badly timed | Well timed |
|---|---|---|
| "Rent goes out Friday" | Friday morning | Wednesday, when you can still move money |
| "Clara's birthday is the 9th" | The 9th | Ten days out, while a gift can still arrive |
| "Your flight moved" | On the way to the airport | Before you have left the house |
| "Ana called twice" | Midnight | When you are not in a meeting |
None of the right-hand column requires cleverness. It requires knowing what you are in the middle of, which is the thing a continuous thread gives you and a fresh chat window never can.
Quiet is a feature
Most days bliq says nothing at all. That is the intended behaviour, not a failure of engagement.
We have no interest in a daily-active-user number that is propped up by manufactured reasons to open the app. The goal is the opposite: that you think about it rarely, because it only appears when appearing is genuinely the right call.
You can also turn the volume down. Fewer nudges, quiet hours, or nothing at all outside the times you name. It is your phone.
What it looks like when it works
You do not notice. That is the whole thing.
The flight got handled before you knew there was a flight problem. The gift arrived on Friday. The rent cleared. Ana got called back at a reasonable hour on a Sunday, and the conversation was about her, not about how long it had been.
An assistant doing this job well is largely invisible. We are fine with that.
Let bliq handle the rest.
It knows you, checks in on you, and quietly gets the small things done. On iPhone today.
