Introduction
Personal assistants are moving from conversation to action.
A request like “order me a bag of coffee” sounds simple. However, to do that the assistant has to receive a message, plan the task, navigate a merchant’s website, authenticate to the right account, complete checkout and return to the user.
A model is one part of that equation, the rest of it is infrastructure that lets an assistant operate in the real world. This is the stack behind BELL, our reference architecture and sample app for building personal assistants that can operate in the real world.
The request starts in a message
It starts with a text, which feels simple from the outside, but iMessage and RCS are separate ecosystems with different APIs, delivery behavior and capabilities. An assistant has to receive the message reliably and keep the responses in the same conversation, even if the protocol changes.
Linq maintains the infrastructure that enables this messaging layer, allowing an assistant to communicate with any user all within a single thread.
The next step is coordinating all the moving parts that come next.
The message becomes a plan
Now that the coffee request has reached the assistant, it has to decide what to do and more importantly have a way to do it.
In Eve, you define the assistant’s instructions and expose tools as functions. Those tools connect a model to services like Browserbase, 1Password, and Stripe Link to carry out the task. For our coffee order, that means giving the assistant ways to browse the internet, access a user’s account and make payments.
The work may also pause along the way to fetch a user’s credentials or get approval for a payment. Eve checkpoints execution so the task can wait and resume with its context intact.
