Some answers don't fit in a text bubble. A weekend itinerary, a headphone comparison, a workout plan: the honest answer has five or six parts, and in a chat thread that becomes a wall of gray text you scroll past twice and never quite absorb.
So we taught Orchid to send cards instead. When an answer needs a little more than just some text, Orchid designs a stack of four to six full-screen cards and sends it as one message. Each card gets a photo Orchid went and found, a short header, and a couple of sentences that lead with the point. You swipe through it like a story.
We built the first version for meetings: a briefing before your next call with who you're meeting, what happened last time, and what to say. People loved swiping through a briefing much more than reading one, and we kept wanting the same treatment for everything else. So we generalized it. Orchid now decides on its own when an answer deserves cards, and it can build them for anything.
Plan a trip you can hold in one hand
hey orchid! plan a trip to lisbon for 4 people this weekend, budget doesn't matter!
What comes back is a stack: an opening card that sets the plan, fly in Friday, stay in Príncipe Real or Chiado, then a card per day, with real advice baked in, like booking dinner and any Fado you care about now because August runs hot and crowded. Every card sits on a photo of the actual place, so by the time you've swiped through, you've half-seen the trip.
And the cards are a starting point, not a brochure. Under the stack, Orchid keeps going: send me your departure city and i'll lock the flight, hotel, transfers, and reservations for all 4 of you.
Compare before you buy
Same shape, different job. Ask can you compare the new airpods max and the sony xm6? and each contender gets its own card: the specs that matter, the weight difference in grams, the battery in hours. The last card is Orchid's pick, with the trade-off stated plainly.
You could assemble the same answer from an hour of reviews and open tabs. The carousel is much easier to parse, and it stays in your thread for when you're ready to order.
A workout split you'll actually open
Tell Orchid you can train three days a week and you're chasing muscle, and the plan arrives as cards: one card per training day with the exact exercises, sets, and reps, and a final card on how to grow, down to the protein target per kilogram of bodyweight.
A PDF training plan dies in your downloads folder. This one lives in the same thread where Orchid already logs your workouts, two scrolls away when you're standing in the gym.
How to get it
There's nothing to set up. If you text Orchid, you already have carousels: ask a question with parts, and Orchid reaches for cards when they beat plain text. You can also ask outright, send it as cards, and it will.
One note on where you're texting from: on iMessage the cards arrive as a single swipeable stack; on regular SMS and RCS they arrive as individual images, same content, less magic.
If you're new here, Orchid is an assistant that lives in your texts. No app, no dashboard. It handles your inbox, your calendar, your plans, and now it shows its work in a form you'll actually look at. Say hi and ask it to plan your weekend 🌸
