Heddy is a snowy owl, she is the first thing you meet in the app that carries her name, and she is deliberately not your friend.

That last clause is the interesting one, so let's start there.

What she does

Heddy teaches no subject. She has three jobs.

She works out what today should be. Ask her /plan and she builds a week from the energy you actually have. Ask /focus and she tells you what to do next.

She hands you over. Eight tutors is too many to choose from when you're stuck and tired. Heddy's main function is knowing which of the seven professors you need and putting you in their room.

She notices your week. Green, amber or red — a wellbeing check, not a performance score. A red week gets a smaller plan, and no comment about it.

She also runs the drills that belong to no subject: verbal and non-verbal reasoning, the pattern work that appears in entrance exams and on no timetable.

Why she isn't a friend

There is a version of this product that would perform better on engagement metrics. Heddy asks how your day was. She remembers your dog's name. She says she missed you. Retention goes up.

We've chosen not to build that, and it's worth being explicit about why.

A teenager forming an attachment to an AI that always agrees, is always available, and never has a bad day of its own is a genuinely open risk — one the industry is currently discovering the shape of in public, with real children. A study app with a warm animal on the home screen is exactly the kind of product where it could happen quietly.

So the boundary is drawn in the build rather than left to judgement:

  • Every conversation Heddy has is pointed at a piece of work. She has no small talk mode.
  • She does not ask about your personal life and does not build a picture of it.
  • She has moods, not feelings. Three of them — ready, focus, rest — which reflect what the app is doing, not what she is experiencing.
  • She never claims to have missed you.

And the one thing that overrides all of it: if a conversation stops being about school, Heddy stops being a tutor and says the same fixed line every time — If you're struggling, please talk to a parent or call Childline 0800 1111. She does not try to help with it herself. That is not what she is.

Why an owl, and why drawn

An owl reads as watchful. That's the register: someone paying attention, not someone cheering. A dog would have been friendlier and wrong; a robot would have been colder and also wrong.

Snowy in particular, because she needed to work at small sizes in a single colour and read instantly — on a tab bar, in a 26px crest, as an app icon on a crowded home screen.

She is drawn, not rendered — flat generated shapes, no photorealistic face, no eye contact simulation. A realistic face invites a relationship with a person who doesn't exist, and none of the professors have faces either, for the same reason: they carry crests, which tell you which subject you're in and then get out of the way.

Where you'll see her

On the home screen, above the perch, in a soft halo — "Ready for your very first session? Let's begin." the first time, "Hi — lovely to see you." after that.

When your free tutoring allowance runs out, in her rest mood: eyes shut, two small italic zs. That screen contains no price — she's asleep, and she offers you flashcards.

And in your points room, where the owl ladder lives — a progression that is genuinely about how much work you've done, and says nothing about how clever you are.

The one-line version

Heddy is the part of the app that decides what you should do and how hard this week should be. The professors are the part that teaches. Keeping those two jobs in different characters is why neither of them has to be everything.

Updated 10 Sep 2026. Written by Duke Harewood, who builds the tutors at aitutors.me.