Nyro — the owl that grows

Nyro is an owl that lives inside your phone. It starts as an egg. Keep it warm and it hatches, and from there it really grows: seven life stages, each giving it something it did not have before. A hatchling only makes sounds. An owlet says a word or two. An adult answers you, and can go and look up what it does not know. NOT AN ANIMATION The owl is not a video or a sprite sheet: it is drawn live, and its proportions change as it grows. The big head of the young one narrows, the feathers change, the gaze steadies. The owl you see today is not the one you will see next week. IT HAS REAL NEEDS Hunger, rest, cleanliness, affection, stimulation, warmth, health. They go down on their own, even with the app closed. None of them is a timer to tap: an owl that is fed but never played with grows up different from one you play with. IT IS NOCTURNAL It sleeps by day. At night it is awake, curious, and wants company. Waking it to play costs it something. IT BECOMES SOMEONE Its character is not chosen at the start: it forms. Curiosity, warmth, boldness, playfulness, talkativeness, independence and sensitivity drift with how you treat it. As an adult it will have an idea of itself drawn from how its life went, and it will tell you. IT KNOWS YOU AND REMEMBERS It remembers what happens to it, and in its sleep it reworks the day and lets the weakest memories go. It learns facts about you from what you say, and when it gets something wrong you can correct it. IT REALLY PERCEIVES With your permission it opens the camera and looks at what you show it, reads text you put in front of it, hears how noisy it is around, knows if you are shaking it, whether it is dark, what time it is, and the name of the place you are in. IT THINKS ON THE PHONE The owl thinks with a language model running on the device, offline. You download the model from inside the app, after accepting Google's Gemma licence. If you would rather not download anything, the owl lives all the same: it answers on instinct, with sentences that come from its own state. ASK THE WISE OWL Beside your owl there is a second voice: an old owl you can ask things. About real owls, about how the app works, about anything. It is not your owl, it cannot see it and does not know how it is doing — and it tells you so itself. IT RESPECTS YOUR TIME No scheduled notifications, no reminders to pull you back. The owl writes to you only when something is genuinely wrong, and stays quiet between 10pm and 8am except for emergencies. If it is fine, nothing reaches you. AND ON YOUR HOME SCREEN A widget with your owl, cut out, at the age it is right now. — Italian and English, following your phone's language. No account. No ads. No purchases. Nothing leaves the phone unless you switch on looking things up. The owl and the wise owl write with a language model: what they say can be wrong. Long-press a reply to report it.