Why Nixi lives in one pill
Open almost any assistant and the first thing you meet is a window. You click, you wait, you type or talk, and then you close it to get back to what you were doing. Nixi has no window. It has a pill.
One shape, not a pile of panels
The pill sits near the top of your screen. At rest it is small: a black capsule with a face. When you ask for something it grows to fit the job, a bar for a command, a strip for dictation, a card for an answer, and then it shrinks back. It is one object changing shape, not a set of panels appearing and disappearing. That sounds like a visual nicety, but it changes how it feels to use. Nothing pops up in front of your work. Nothing needs to be dismissed.
It never steals your place
You call a voice assistant in the middle of something: a sentence in a document, a field in a form. If it grabbed the keyboard focus, you would lose your place, so the closed pill never takes it. Your cursor stays exactly where it was. Only when you deliberately open the chat bar, with the F9 key or the "more" button, does it take focus, because then you want to type.
It shows what you are saying right now
Speech runs longer than a small pill. So the live line shows the end of what you are saying, not the start. The newest words stay in view and the older ones slide off the left. You can tell at a glance that it is hearing you.
Questions are answered where they are asked
If Nixi has to ask "are you sure?", the yes and no buttons are on the pill itself. You should never have to open something just to say no to something.
A face, because it needs to tell you things
The face is how Nixi says "I'm listening", "I'm thinking" and "done" without making a sound or showing a paragraph of text. The same idea runs through the sounds it makes: a short, quiet cue is enough.
Yours to place
Now that it is small and polite, it should also be yours. You can drag the pill anywhere on your screen and it stays there, remembered for each monitor and kept on screen. In Settings you can make it more see-through, so it sits over your work instead of on top of it. You can send it back to the top any time.
The whole product is the pill. We would rather make one small thing feel right than build a big thing that gets in the way.