The Pet Parent App has an AI companion named Lorem. Pet parents ask it the small questions that come up every week. Can my dog eat this? How often should I bathe a kitten? My cat is doing something strange, should I worry?
The app is live on the App Store and Play Store, and Lorem is where a lot of our current work goes. I run the platform behind the app. Here are the three decisions that shaped Lorem.
It answers about your pet
If you ask a general chatbot “is this safe for my dog?”, it answers for some average dog that does not exist.
Lorem already has the pet’s profile when the question comes in: species, breed, age, weight, and the history the app has stored. The same question should get a different answer for an old cat on medication and for a young Labrador. The app knows which one it is talking about, so Lorem does too.
People can get general pet advice anywhere on the internet. They open our app because it knows their pet.
Getting this right had very little to do with the AI model. It was data work. For each kind of question we had to decide which parts of the profile and records go to the model, and what Lorem is allowed to do with them.
It lives on the server
The app is Flutter, and the quick way would have been to call the AI straight from the app. We did not do that. All the AI logic is in our Node.js and Express backend, and the app only shows the conversation.
I am very happy with this choice. We keep changing the prompts, the context and the safety rules as we see what people ask. Because all of it is on the server, a change goes live the same day. If it was inside the app, every small prompt fix would wait for app store review, and then wait again for users to update.
It knows when to stop
Some questions should not be answered by an app. If a pet is sick, the right answer at some point is “take your pet to a vet”.
Lorem is built to see that point and say exactly that. It does not give a confident guess about symptoms it cannot examine.
We treat this as the most important part of the feature. An AI that answers everything about a sick animal will one day be wrong in a way that hurts a pet. After one answer like that, nobody would trust Lorem again, and they would be right. The refusal is the reason we can keep Lorem in the app.