Cyrano is named after a man who gave someone else the right words.
Cyrano de Bergerac is a soldier and a poet. He can win a duel while composing a ballad about it, and he does. He is also famous for his nose, which arrives a moment before he does, and which he will joke about himself but allow nobody else to.
He is in love with Roxane. He has never told her. He is sure that no one could look at his face and love what is behind it.
Roxane loves Christian, a young soldier who is handsome, decent and hopeless with words. Every time he tries to tell her how he feels, it comes out wrong.
So Cyrano makes him an offer: you bring the face, I'll bring the words. He writes Christian's letters. One night, under Roxane's balcony, he whispers the lines for Christian to repeat, and when that fails he steps into the shadows and speaks himself.
When the army is sent to the siege of Arras, Cyrano slips through enemy lines twice a day to post a letter to her. Christian doesn't even know how many have gone.
Roxane crosses a battlefield to reach the man who wrote those letters. She tells him she first loved him for his looks, and now she would love him if he had none. What won her was the voice on the page.
That is the idea this product is built on. The right words, at the right moment, are how people feel close to each other.
There was a real Cyrano: Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac, born in 1619, a soldier and writer who imagined voyages to the moon two centuries before anyone built a rocket.
In 1897 Edmond Rostand turned him into the hero of a play. On opening night in Paris the audience would not stop applauding. Ever since, a Cyrano has meant one thing: someone who finds the words for you.
Nobody today is short of things to say. We are short of minutes. A birthday slips past. A simple question waits three days. The people who matter start to wonder if they still do.
So we built Cyrano. It reads how you write to each person, and answers the chats you choose the way you would: your words, your jokes, your timing. When something really matters, it stops and asks you.
There is one difference from the story, and it is the important one. The first Cyrano's words were his own, sent under another man's name. Ours are yours. Cyrano learns your voice, never replaces it, and you can step in at any moment.
Says it the way you would.