Orient
- Role
- Product & direction
- Studio
- Atheam Technologies
- Stage
- In build, Freetown
- Platform
- Android, on-device
- Year
- 2026
Study like the internet never left you behind.
Four years ago I gave a TEDx talk asking how we get more young people in Sierra Leone into tech. The question I would ask now is different. Not how do we get them in, but how should they orient themselves when AI is moving faster than the schools and job markets meant to prepare them.
Sierra Leonean university students have phones. Lecturers have laptops. Most have heard of ChatGPT. Almost none of them are using AI in any meaningful way in their academic lives. The gap is not access to tools, because the tools are free and a download away. What is missing is any idea of how to use them well.
Orient is an Android companion that runs its AI on the phone. Lectures arrive as voice notes, readings as forwarded PDFs, past papers as photographs. It turns those into study material without asking anyone to leave the surfaces they already use, and without needing a connection to do it.
In short
In build in Freetown, demoing 2026, with the essay behind it a Gemma 4 Challenge winner in writing.
The thinking in short: meet students inside WhatsApp, run the model on the phone, equip lecturers first, and teach the methods themselves, not just the material.
WhatsApp stays; Orient bridges to it
Academic life here already has an operating system. Long-press a voice note, share it to Orient, share the result back into the same group. Nobody migrates anywhere.
The smallest model, on purpose
Gemma on-device via LiteRT-LM. The model downloads once and is yours at midnight with no bars, which is what lets studying with it become routine.
Lecturers first, because they are the multiplier
One lecturer reaches two hundred students with a single action, and their own plain-English quiz format becomes infrastructure their students carry.
It teaches the methods, not just the work
Active recall, spaced repetition, explain-it-back: the methods with the evidence behind them, each one tap away, offered by the reading surface at natural seams.
It walks you to the better tool instead of faking it
When the job needs a bigger model and a connection, Orient hands you to the real thing with the materials prepared. The handoff is the pedagogy.
The results
- Product and direction:
- Theodore Rogers
- Studio:
- Atheam Technologies
- On-device model:
- Gemma via LiteRT-LM
- Stage:
- In build, demoing 2026
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