Because a face is the fastest status bar people have ever read. You know when a friend is listening, thinking, unsure or pleased without a single word. We wanted an assistant you could understand the same way — from the corner of your eye, while you get on with your day.
Assistants talk. We wanted one that works.
Most AI lives in a chat box: you ask, it tells you how, and you do the doing. Ice is built the other way round. It has hands — a browser it can drive, your files, and any tool with an MCP server — and when you ask for something with steps, it goes and does the steps.
Hands need manners.
Something that can act on your computer has to earn that. So Ice asks before anything that writes, sends or spends, until you tell it that kind of action is fine. Every permission lives in one place, where you can pause it for an hour or take it back for good. What it learns about how you work stays on your own computer, in a file you can look at and delete.
Quiet is a feature.
The old desktop assistants failed by interrupting. Ice is designed to stay silent unless the moment is right — and it measures whether it was. Every offer it makes is scored by what you did next, and a “not now” makes it wait longer next time.
Why charge for a waitlist?
Because a free list fills with people who clicked once. $5 is small enough not to matter to someone who wants this, and large enough that the people in line will actually install it and tell us what’s wrong. It’s also yours back, in full, any time before launch.
— The people building Ice