HOWI Won't Guess
HOWI won't guess how your blinds work
Questions about specific in-room equipment now get an honest answer when the host hasn't documented it — never a guess about how to operate it.
"How do the blinds work?" seems like a harmless question for a general AI model to answer from common sense. In a specific room it isn't — every blind, thermostat, and TV setup is different, and a wrong guess sends a guest fumbling with the wrong control in the dark.
What shipped
A deterministic check now runs before any question about in-property equipment reaches the AI model at all. If there's no verified information about that specific item, HOWI says so honestly — with a handoff to the host's contact info when one is configured — instead of asking a general-purpose model to guess how to operate it.
This pairs with an expanded hard rule against explaining how in-unit fixtures work from general knowledge, and a new set of offline checks that verify the rule actually holds.
Why it matters
This is one of the more consequential grounding improvements HOWI has shipped: it moves the "don't guess" rule from something the AI model is merely instructed to follow, to something enforced deterministically in code before the model is even asked.
Availability
Shipped July 3–7, 2026, and in continuous use since.
