The First Time We Showed Anyone Tagore

On the evening of the 28th of June, we did something we had been dreading and longing to do in equal measure: we switched on a camera and, for the first time, showed Tagore to people who were not us. Four of us have spent years building this device. Putting a working prototype in front of a room of reservists, live and unrehearsed, was the most exposed any of us had felt about it.

The HDMI cable to our big screen snapped clean off about a minute before we began. The camera was stubbornly blurry. The audio took a while to behave. And it was, despite all of that, one of the best evenings of the whole project. Here is what we showed, and what you taught us back.

Tagore, in the flesh

Tagore is a single-purpose writing device, roughly the size of a small typewriter, about thirty-five centimetres wide. You wake it with a fingerprint, type on a mechanical keyboard, and when you are done the screen rolls away. There are three modes: writing, research, and journaling, and your last six documents wait on the home screen so you can drop straight back in.

The whole thing is built to disappear. There is a complete focus mode in which every element leaves the screen and there is nothing in front of you but the words. The screen sits at a fixed angle, the same angle the paper sat at in the old typewriters. Ours is modelled on the Olivetti Lettera, which is a story for another day.

The assistant named after a poet

In the corner sits Tagore himself. The device is named after Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet who in 1913 became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and we gave the assistant a personality drawn from the man: his dignity, and a little of his steel. He famously returned a knighthood to the British crown in protest at a massacre. You can read his full story here.

What matters most is what the assistant will not do. It is a research assistant, not a ghostwriter. If you are writing a story set in 1980s Britain and need to check who was prime minister, you ask it, instead of opening a laptop and falling into the feeds. It saves every question against the project you are writing. But it will never finish your sentence for you.

It only has research capabilities. It will never suggest anything in your writing.

Proof that you wrote it

When you export your work, Tagore attaches what we call an Authorship Passport: a record of exactly how much AI was used, how many sessions you wrote in, and how many words in each. Write without any AI and it shows no sessions at all. It is there so that, in a world growing suspicious of every piece of text, you can simply prove the work is yours. We wrote more about why that matters here.

A map of your own story

One feature drew a lot of questions. Highlight all your chapters and Tagore draws a map: every character, how they relate to one another, and where your timeline is heading. If the algorithm gets a connection wrong, you correct it yourself. It is useful for holding a complex story in your head, and even more useful for finding your way back in after weeks away from the desk. I built it because I have been trying to write a novel for years, in the gaps between hospital shifts, and I kept losing the thread.

The details you wanted to poke at

You went straight for the hardware, which we loved. The keyboard is an ergonomic Alice layout, angled so your hands fall naturally and your wrists can last a long session, with hot-swappable switches you can change to your taste and full backlighting. We tested it with hundreds of students at the University of Oxford, one of our partners, and built it because the keyboard on the device I had been using, a Freewrite, never satisfied me.

The shipping screen will be a reflective, anti-glare LCD. We chose it over E-ink because E-ink lags behind your typing, and this keeps pace while sipping power. The battery is a 5,500 mAh cell, the size you would find in a high-end phone, currently good for about twelve hours, and we are aiming for a full day. The light on the back doubles as a Pomodoro timer that flashes every twenty minutes in any colour you like, which several of you who write better with a little stimulation were glad to hear. There is USB-A and USB-C for export and charging, two fans on the prototype that we hope to remove entirely in the final, lighter device, and two accessories on the way: a battery case for extra hours, and a small Bluetooth thermal printer for quick prints. No theses, but handy.

What you changed, already

The best part of any demo is being shown your blind spots. One of you asked whether Tagore would export citations in Chicago and MLA. It had honestly not occurred to us. It will be in the shipping software, and we owe that to you. Another asked for more keyboard shortcuts and a way to shape the software; we are looking at building a mock-up so you can help design it with us. This is exactly why we opened the doors.

An honest word on price

We were candid on the night about the economics, so we will be here too. Tagore is assembled in the United Kingdom, not China, in small batches, for a level of quality we can stand behind. There is no subscription. You buy the device and it is yours, the way a typewriter was. That honesty has a cost: at small volumes the price has to climb to stay sustainable, and the single biggest thing that keeps it affordable is more of you.

If you were there on the night, thank you. You turned a nerve-wracking evening into a genuinely joyful one, and the device is better today than it was that morning because of you. If you were not, the door is still open.

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