Muse and Instinct have a new competitor in town. While these AI agents are known for proactively tackling tasks like booking reservations, cancelling subscriptions, hunting down K-pop merch, Ambi is thinking about a different approach. It’s designed to tackle tasks or action items mid-conversation, before you’ve even asked.
Launching today from Mistlabs on Apple platforms including iOS 18 and above, alongside the Apple Watch and MacBook, Ambi isn’t necessarily vying to automate your grocery order upon command. Rather, it’s built for anticipation. The distinction matters. Muse and Instinct operate in a “give me a goal, I’ll go handle it” mode. Ambi operates in a “here’s what you’re about to need” mode.
Built on ambient AI, essentially AI that observes you assuming you’ve turned on listening on your devices, Ambi retains what it hears across devices, with memory and context persisting from screen to screen.
At the same time, it can act while you’re still in the middle of a meeting. Ambi’s Routines feature, which sets recurring tasks, can operate based on how you steer it by pointing Ambi at what it should generally be keeping track of. For instance, if it’s a presentation deck for a final report, Ambi can recognize a conversation related to that deck and start acting on whatever it thinks you need. This may be research, secondary sources, and fact-checking, all aimed at getting the deck finished. Or it could be insights that Ambi believes are inadequate or missing. And this can happen mid-conversation, in real-time, not after the fact. Even if you’re jumping from one device to another, everything you’ve done on one is available across your other Apple devices.
There’s a catch to being Apple-only, though. The context Ambi can gather is capped by whatever those devices can see and hear. That’s part of why Mistlabs’ CEO Peter Mo raised US$26 million in Pre-A funding from Luminous Ventures and Huaqin to build its own wearable AI device.
But the company has bigger ambitions. Mistlabs is touting a collaborative platform that would let one user’s Ambi agents communicate with another user’s agents. The idea is that Ambi could one day act as a mediator between users or even a tool for real-time negotiations during meetings, drawing on how well it understands the people it works for.
Now launching out of Beta, Ambi is available to download from their website.