Even if you have been living under a rock, you have probably heard about OpenClaw. However, setting up your own instance might seem daunting and you’ll need a device for it to run on – why not just use your phone? That’s what Tecno was thinking when it started work on EllaClaw.

EllaClaw will be built into Tecno’s AI assistant (called Ella) and will go into beta next month. If you are interested, soon you will be able to sign up for the beta through an online registration. More detail to follow.

Seriously, though, what is OpenClaw? It’s an AI agent that has a number of skills that you can use, typically over a chat interface (e.g. Telegram). However, Tecno will make EllaClaw accessible via its Ella assistant. As for skills, these are like program instructions that you can write yourself or use ones that someone else wrote.

To get you started, Tecno has developed a couple of skills. The Smart SMS Summary skill will look through messages and flag important ones (e.g. bank notifications, bills and time-sensitive messages) while also marking ones that are safe to delete.

The Daily Schedule skill will look through your calendar events and notes, check the weather and the news and write up a daily briefing for you. Tecno will release more skills in the future and you will be able to add your own.

Using EllaClaw’s skills

Skills can be triggered via natural language commands or they can run on a schedule. The neat thing is that skills contain all the details and intricacies of how the job gets done, you don’t have to explain it every time.

OpenClaw (and thus EllaClaw) has persistent memory – this allows it to learn from past interactions and adapt to your preferences and habits. The memory also allows the agent to keep track of long-running or scheduled tasks.

In order to do its job, EllaClaw will need to pull information from multiple sources seamlessly. Tecno has built it into HIOS, its Android branch, so that it can work at the system level.

As you can imagine, there is a lot of potential for things to go wrong – this is why EllaClaw has built-in privacy safeguards that isolate user data and prevent access by unauthorized third parties.